“Miracle Creek,” a debut novel by former trial lawyer Angie Kim, is at once a gripping courtroom thriller with twists and turns, a deftly told, multigenerational immigrant family drama and a book about being an “autism mom.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 355 pages, $27.) We have no trouble believing that those types of people are real. They just come in the coldblooded, end-justifies-the-means, laws-don’t-apply-to-us human variety.
But there’s no shortage of monsters, that’s for sure. There’s little in the way of King’s usual emphasis on the occult beyond the topic of psychic powers, which, according to surveys, as many as 40% of Americans believe are real. This is a thriller - and a good one, at that. Tim sets out to help Luke, although neither of them knows exactly what they’re getting themselves into. He ends up in a small backwater town in South Carolina, where he’s befriended by Tim Jamieson, a former cop. Fearing that the institution has agents all over the country (an assessment the reader knows to be true), he decides to exit the train before it arrives in a major city.
Luke escapes and hitches a ride in a boxcar. The experiments are starting to get results - although in the process, they’re killing the test subjects, a situation addressed by simply kidnapping more subjects. Luke Ellis, a 12-year-old with minor telekinetic powers - he can make an empty pizza pan rattle on a table - is kidnapped from his Minneapolis home and carted off to a supersecret special ops center in Maine that is trying to develop telekinesis and mental telepathy as weapons. King includes references to neighborhoods and even the streets that run through them. And not just obvious ones, such as the Mall of America. Only a few pages of the action take place here, but there are repeated nods to the city throughout. One of the protagonists in this gripping story is from Minneapolis. It appears that when Stephen King was in town this year for the inaugural Wordplay book festival, he did a little studying up on us. By Stephen King (Scribner, 557 pages, $30.)
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