PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"Initially [the book] reads as slightly puritanical — drunks are bad, fat people are dumb, Jack and Wynn are handsome and good at everything — but this tendency reverses so completely and shockingly at the end that it can almost, but not quite, knock any smugness from a reader ... The real delight is the nature writing. The River is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots burning underfoot in the aftermath of a fire. Heller... has an extraordinary facility for describing topography and vegetation; we can feel the sharpness of the rocks and the trilling excitement of the river as it approaches rapids. He brilliantly describes the physical process of wild living ... There is a tendency toward status-flagging in this novel ... This social positioning tempers the peril a little, making the boys seem like adventure-tourists who could have done something else with their academic sabbaticals. But none of that really affects the utter joy contained in this book, which is a suspenseful tale told with glorious drama and lyrical flair.\
Stephen King
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMaintaining a tight structure, King uses End of Watch to loop back to Hodges’ handling of the explosive episode that started off the trilogy ... As is often the case, what is utterly beguiling is King’s slapdash audacity...There are times, though, when [this] slapdash audacity can be off-putting ... There are many stereotypical themes and devices in crime fiction: righteous cops shooting a criminal at the novel’s end, gender constructs salvaged from another age, invincible heroes and so on. End of Watch is burdened by none of them. It’s a great big genre-busting romp, a gloriously fitting end to the Bill Hodges trilogy.
