End of Watch

Holly has grown greatly since Hodges first met her in Mr. Mercedes. She is slim, brown-haired and nearing 50 but often seems much younger, having lived a very circumscribed life before meeting Hodges and coming into her own. Initially, Hodges wasn’t comfortable with her, but he felt guilty for misjudging Holly’s cousin Olivia, which contributed to Olivia’s death. Hodges made the effort to get to know Holly and found one of the best and closest friends of his life. He has been a friend and mentor to Holly, and she has pushed him to be a better, broader-minded person.

Holly is dogged and meticulous, using her extensive knowledge of films to make associations that most people miss. She also thinks outside boxes in ways that cause people who don’t know her to dismiss her as irrational. She doesn’t bound her knowledge with a set of what is possible. Like Hodges, she goes where the evidence takes her, but she allows for a greater range of evidence and doesn’t stop following it when it leads into the unknown. She is often literal, but she takes in details and makes connections that escape other people.

In the next book, The Outsider, Holly’s ability to accept the abnatural will be the key to catching a killer even stranger than Brady Hartsfield.

Jerome is tall and muscular. After graduating from Harvard, he is spending some time working for Habitat for Humanity in Phoenix, demonstrating empathy and social connection in addition to intelligence. Jerome has already navigated his identity as a Black man from an upper-middle class background. He gives some of his time and energy to helping people who don’t have his advantages in life.

Jerome plays a smaller role in this story than in Book 1, and Hodges and Holly both try to shield him, knowing that he has more life ahead of him and more connections to the world than they do, especially his family. Jerome resists being shielded. He has more to lose than Holly and Hodges, so the risk he takes in going to their rescue has greater potential consequences than the other two. Jerome acts on the principle that everyone is worth saving. Holly and Hodges have as much value as anyone else who has Jerome’s connections to the world. He also sees how much they both have left to give. Both Holly and Hodges have saved thousands of lives and will save more. Most of all, he simply loves them too much to abandon them.

Jerome’s little sister is 16 and just starting to establish her identity outside her family and her school friends. She has always been aware of her race and socioeconomic status, but she has a tendency to exaggerate the significance of negative feelings. Barbara also calls out what she believes to be racist behavior, although King creates ambiguity as to whether the incidents are examples of discrimination or just immature behavior among adolescents. For example, Barbara interprets the fact that she is invited to some parties but not all parties as being evidence of racism rather than the fact that no teenager is ever invited to every party. Barbara eventually finds a balance symbolized by her friendship with Dereese, who combines some of the ambition and determination of Barbara’s older brother and the energy and color of the best part of the culture of Lowtown. Dereese is amused and attracted by Barbara’s anger when he teases her a little too assertively. Under her sheltered upbringing, she demonstrates a strength and self-respect that belies her vision of herself as a pampered middle-class girl.

Pete and Hodges were once partners in the police force. Hodges has since become a detective, but Pete is still chasing accolades. His new partner Isabelle at first does nothing to teach him humility, but as he begins to recognize her narrow-mindedness and fixation on power and politics, he has his own change of perspective and, like Hodges, learns humility.

To do him credit, Pete was bothered when he realized his own role in Olivia Trelawney’s suicide in Mr. Mercedes. He misjudged Olivia out of prejudice, which resulted in deaths that could have been avoided, and he resolved never to do that again. When he sees the same traits in Isabelle, he sees the worst in himself and determines that this time, he won’t make the same mistakes as in the past.

Isabelle is Pete Huntley’s new partner since Hodges’s retirement. Isabelle is stunning, smart, and ambitious. She doesn’t like Holly, finding her too unusual to be worthwhile, so she can’t appreciate Holly’s insights. She is focused on her career, which means she is anxious to close cases to make herself look good, and she doesn’t like ambiguities.

Isabelle is a contagonist—a character who doesn’t directly oppose the protagonist but nevertheless presents an obstacle to the protagonist’s success. Isabelle resists Hodges’s conclusions and actively tries to prevent him from pursuing Brady. Isabelle’s inability to consider out-of-the-box solutions makes it impossible for her to stop the Hartsfield murders, but so long as she refuses to acknowledge a connection, she can maintain the appearance of a high solve rate. She isn’t consciously suppressing the truth, only rejecting a solution that she knows to be impossible. Her rigidity and ambition cause Pete to re-evaluate himself and facilitate his transformation and growth. He sees his own failings in her.

Brady emerges from his catatonic coma as malicious as ever. With his body all but immobile, he has to rely entirely on his mind, but his mind has been altered by Dr. Babineau’s experimentation, leaving him as dangerous as before. Brady has always been driven by lust for power and fascination with death. In Book 1, Brady had no reluctance to die so long as by doing so, he could count on manipulating the media into giving him all the attention and notoriety he craved while causing the maximum amount of misery and possibly finally crushing Hodges’s will to live.

This time, Brady has fought his way back from death, and he has no intention of dying again. Manipulating people to die by suicide has always been his biggest thrill, and now he has a whole new set of tools, nothing as crude as explosives or a car crash. In addition to the thrill of manipulating vulnerable teenagers into self-destruction, he is enraged that Hodges defeated him once, and he intends to exact the most painful revenge he can by getting into Hodges’s mind and making him kill Holly.

In the end, Brady is undone by Holly’s determination and Jerome’s love. Hodges shows him a final harsh mercy by allowing Brady to end his own life rather than enduring a prolonged suffering. Brady completes the self-destruction he attempted at the concert six years earlier. Brady’s end parallel’s Hodges in that his end is accompanied by excruciating pain, similar to the cancer slowly killing Hodges.

Doctor Babineau is the neuro-scientist who uses Brady as a guinea-pig, regarding him as disposable. Brady resents Babineau first for using him as a test subject, then for losing interest in him when the treatment seems to have no result, then for treating him like a pet hamster when the experimental drug begins to have an effect.

Babineau is arrogant and narcissistic. He never sees Brady as anything other than an object. He anticipates that if the experimental drug works, it will bring him international fame. He overlooks the likelihood that unlawful experimentation on a human being will likely result in a prison sentence even if it has a positive result. Unlike Brady’s other victims, Babineau seems to deserve his fate. At one point, Babineau calls Brady “a Frankenstein,” but as Brady points out, it is Babineau who has tampered with life and death by illegally experimenting on Brady using drugs that were not approved for human trials.