The novel’s central character, Holly Gibney, a middle-aged private investigator, has featured in other recent crime fiction by King. As well as forming part of crime-solving teams in the Mr. Mercedes trilogy (2014-2016) and The Outsider (2018), she appears in the first novella of the collection If It Bleeds (2020) – a story which, according to King in an Author’s Note appended to Holly, presents in miniature the plot of this substantial new volume.