She hires Hodges to find whoever sent the letter. Mercedes sent to Olivia, inviting Olivia to contact him through the Debbie’s Blue Umbrella chat room. Proceeding with the investigation, Hodges contacts Olivia’s younger sister, Janey. There, he keeps a supply of homemade plastic explosives and cell phone detonators. At home, where he lives with his mother with alcoholism (they have an incestuous relationship), Brady has a “control room” in the basement, activated by voice commands. Mercedes is revealed to be Brady Hartsfield, an emotionally “disturbed” man in his twenties who works as an IT technician for Discount Electronix and has a second job driving an ice cream truck around Hodges’s neighborhood. Olivia Trelawney died by suicide a few months after the incident due to her guilt over the crime: When Hodges was investigating the case, Trelawney denied that she left the spare key in the car, but Hodges and his partner, Pete Huntley, never believed fully her and half-blamed her for enabling the murders. Mercedes stole the car he used in the murders from a wealthy woman named Olivia Trelawney. Instead of handing the letter over to the police, Hodges decides to investigate the case himself. The killer tells Hodges how to contact him using an online chat room called Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. His depression lifts when he receives a letter from the killer, taunting him for his failure to close the case before retiring. Hodges is divorced, does not have a relationship with his adult daughter, and at times considers death by suicide.

One year later, a recently retired detective named Bill Hodges is having a rough time with retirement: His whole identity was defined by his job, and he can’t see a future for himself without it. The driver kills eight people and wounds 12 more before escaping.

Mercedes”) drives a Mercedes sedan into a crowd of unemployed people who are attending a job fair. In April 2009, a man who calls himself “The Mercedes Killer” (or “Mr. It takes place in 2009 and is narrated in the third-person past tense. The novel is divided into three parts, each of which comprises two or three long chapters. This guide uses the 2015 paperback reprint edition published by Gallery Books.Ĭontent Warning: This guide contains incidents of mass violence, suicidal ideation, incest, child abuse, mental illness bias, and racism-including the use of racial slurs-which appear in the source text. Mercedes won the 2015 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and was the 2014 Goodreads choice for best mystery and thriller novel.Ī TV series based on the novel premiered in 2017. Mercedes is the first installment of the Bill Hodges trilogy and is followed by Finders Keepers (2015) and End of Watch (2016).

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