Mr. Mercedes

King has written several hard-boiled detective novels, some of which are realistic and some that contain supernatural elements.

• The Mr. Mercedes series (2015) King considers his first hard-boiled detective series. The supernatural element appears in the third book of the series, End of Watch.

• The Outsider (2019), is less hard-boiled crime than it is a detective story, but it features Holly Gibney, one of the major characters from the Mr. Mercedes series.

• Joyland (2014), Hard-Case Crime, contains minor elements of the supernatural. The author plays with some of the conventions of the genre but is for the most part typical of the hard-boiled genre. King turns the Joyland amusement park into a self-contained urban environment, and the focus is on human corruption rather than Evil on a grand scale.