The Colorado Kid [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Stephen King (Author), Jeffrey DeMunn (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 2005

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues.

But that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...?

No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself...

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

DeMunn offers an appropriately lighthearted reading of this surprisingly toothless mystery from King. The prerequisite is the ability to handle the pronounced Maine accent the book demands, as it features a pair of veteran newspaper reporters from an island off the state's coast relating a story to an eager young intern. DeMunn handles the old men's colloquialisms with consistency and ease while the two take turns spinning the tale of "the Colorado Kid," a man found dead on a local beach years ago without any identification or any feasible reason for being there. With its regional flavor and chummy protagonists, the book never lacks charm, and the story is intriguing. It hardly delivers the kind of noir tale that the first entry in the Hard Case Crime series would lead one to expect, but DeMunn does a more than adequate job of narrating this cozy mystery that will leave listeners not so much shocked as pleasantly perplexed.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

There’s nothing like a good noir crime novel, and The Colorado Kid is nothing like a good noir crime novel. King’s refusal to play by the time-honored rules of the genre exasperated critics, who might have been more forgiving had King delivered a compelling story. The plot, related by two crusty newspapermen entirely in conversation, develops at a glacial pace, and the characters’ exaggerated Yankee accents bog down the dialogue. Granted, the story’s endearing protagonists won over a few reviewers, but even the most generous critics were forced to concede the book’s many flaws.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio; Unabridged edition (October 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743550404
• ISBN-13: 978-0743550406
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (258 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,151,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are the Dark Tower novels, Cell, From a Buick 8, Everything's Eventual, Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Bag of Bones. His acclaimed nonfiction book, On Writing, was also a bestseller. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gets you thinking, June 20, 2011

By 

G. Castle - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Colorado Kid (Hard Case Crime #13) (Mass Market Paperback)

I got this book hoping it would give me some more the back-story to Haven (SyFy show based on book). Well it really didn't help me much there and it wasn't the best story. But I still did enjoy reading it. The only thing I wish was that there might have been a bit more of hints to why the Colorado Kid was in Maine, or even some more theories on why by the characters. I guess that was just left more to the reader though, which is fine by me.
So if you want to get this hoping it will give more info for Haven, you probably won't learn anything of use. If you are looking for a mystery with a solution, you also out of luck. But if you want a shorter mystery story that could leave you thinking of the possibilities, this should be good for you.

58 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Mystery And A Larger Realization, March 13, 2007

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Colorado Kid (Hard Case Crime #13) (Mass Market Paperback)

As I read this enjoyable page-turner, The Colorado Kid, some sixteen years after opening my first Stephen King book, it occurred to me that King might just be the wisest fiction writer ever to live. Who else delivers so many small, unexpected grains of wisdom in his books? Who else could work so many life lessons into the otherwise limiting genres for which he is best known? And yet King does just that, and he does it every time, The Colorado Kid no exception. I won't point out what I'm talking about, but if anyone who has ever read Stephen King truly stops to think about it, the fact comes clear.

The Colorado Kid is yet another "post-retirement" release from Maine's favorite son. In its fast-moving two-hundred pages the facts of a beguilingly unsolved (there's a hint there for you) mystery is told to an interning journalist (hey, from Cincinnati, no less) by two veteran newsmen, one in his nineties, the other a mere slip of a boy of sixty-five. The story concerns the discovery a generation back, in April 1980, of an unknown and for a time unidentifiable man found dead on a local beach. The body appears to have fallen victim to natural causes, and yet yields no identification, only a handful of clues that set off more questions than answers. The tale---not a story!---of who this man was, where he was from, and why against all logic he came to be alone on a beach in Maine, as well as how he met his most unusual death, is explored by the two old journalists and the intern, and for those learned in the Zen maxim about "the tale being journey sufficient in itself; the end unneeded" The Colorado Kid should be a pleasing read. For others...

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Boring, December 27, 2005

By 

Christopher Hivner (Dallastown, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Colorado Kid (Hard Case Crime #13) (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a tedious novel. It's only 180 pages long and I still had to push myself to bother finishing it. This is really nothing more than a short story padded out to short novel length and that's one of its many problems: The central mystery is uninteresting. The way it is written, 2 old men telling the story to a young woman, allows for no real action or confrontation. The 2 old men telling the story are irritating and long-winded, having much difficulty coming to a point, there is no resolution at the end and no point in the story being told. This is not a 'hard-boiled' crime novel as the cover suggests.

I'm not really sure what this book is besides dull. Stephen king is a wonderful writer and it's enticing to see him try a new genre, but if anyone else had written The Colorado Kid, it would not have been published in this series.