Anderson wants people to be able to sleep again.Įxcept Maitland has an alibi. They wanted to publicly shame him, get him off the streets in case he decided to kill again, and also demonstrate to the residents of Flint City that justice has been served. They arrest him without interviewing him in advance because they were afraid Maitland would get spooked and run. Anderson doesn’t trust himself to make the arrest personally, afraid he might strangle the man. Anderson has Maitland-a man he’s known for years, who coached Anderson’s boy in baseball-dead to rights.Īnderson is so sure of his case that-with the blessing of the District Attorney, Bill Samuels, who wants to expedite the process-he has Maitland arrested at a pivotal moment in a Little League semifinal game in front of over 1,500 people, including Maitland’s wife and two daughters. His fingerprints are everywhere, and the DNA evidence, when it comes in, is the final nail in the coffin. Eyewitnesses who know Maitland see him pick the boy up in a nondescript white van, place him at the crime scene, and establish his actions after the murder, wearing blood-soaked clothing. He has an ironclad case against Terry Maitland, a popular English teacher and Little League coach, in the sadistic, cannibalistic murder of 11-year-old Frank Peterson. Flint City, Oklahoma Detective Ralph Anderson (no relation to the little boy from Storm of the Century) is forced to confront two contradictory but incontrovertible facts. The book starts out as a solid procedural that makes use of contemporary forensic procedures, with a touch of Agatha Christie thrown in. The inability to believe plays a major part in The Outsider. He wonders if they’re up to the task because their former ability to believe in the power of certain talismans gave them the strength to hurt Pennywise. Mike Hanlon contemplates this issue when he’s planning to summon his childhood friends back to Derry to confront the monster they defeated but did not destroy nearly three decades earlier. One of the themes of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It was the notion that adults lose the ability to believe in the kinds of things they embraced as children.

Stephen king the outsider review