In Stephen King's 2023 crime novel, "Holly," the author's favorite character (and mine), Holly Gibney, solves a series of grisly murders in her first stand-alone book after appearing as an anxiety-ridden sleuth in a number of King's earlier works, starting with the first installment of the Bill Hodges trilogy, "Mr. Mercedes," in 2014. After forming an unlikely partnership with Hodges and aiding in his investigations, she's no longer the person she was when her character was first introduced — the chainsmoking and painfully quiet black sheep of a wealthy family — but someone with a deep well of inner strength and an intuitive knack for solving the riddle of others' lives, but not her own, by making her hangups and compulsions work in her favor, turning what could otherwise be simply referred to as a grab-bag of mental illness into a unique blend of skills that allows her to see clues that others are blind to and recognize patterns in people's actions that the non-neurospicy would not as easily pick up on.
Described by King as someone who is insecure and yet at the same time has a lot of courage, Holly doubles down on the work she's done to not only trust herself as being someone capable of saving the day, but to allow others to trust in her as that, pushing herself even further to combat her insecurities in order to get out of her own way to solve not one case, but two, in her second stand-alone book, "Never Flinch," in which she takes on a sidequest as a body guard for a larger than life abortion rights influencer named Kate McKay as her life is threatened by a religious zealot stalker while also helping her friend, Detective Izzy Jaynes, investigate a string of murders committed by someone hell-bent on justifying their own beyond strained moral compass.
