Only a year after his retirement, prolific writer Stephen King has returned with an entry in the Hard Case Crime series of novels. Unfortunately his return is not cause for celebration.

Released directly into mass market paperback with a lurid cover promising sex and intrigue, the prospect of a pulp mystery from the master of horror seems too good to be true, and it is.

King attempts to transcend the generic pulp conventions of hard-boiled detectives and femme fatales by setting his new book in his old stomping grounds of Maine and presenting the reader with a young journalism intern who hears of an unsolved mystery from the two old newspaper men who serve as both mentors and storytellers for her and the reader.

King has always excelled at depictions of small town Americana, so the eccentricities of Moose-Lookit Island and the staff of The Weekly Islander come easily to him, but his mystery feels hollow, and the storytelling structure is awkward.

Since Stephanie, the intern, hears the case from the journalist narrators, the book is almost entirely dialogue.

While King indulges in a variety of Northeastern vocal traits and clunky prose, he also fatigues the reader as the longing for more than a paragraph of prose is continually thwarted.

The mystery itself is a little banal, an unsolved death that is never explained, leaving the reader frustrated by King’s refusal to commit to a final solution.

The concept of the mystery with no answer is the novel’s most obvious theme, and King examines the need for coherent storytelling in both journalism and the mystery novel, but the entire experiment seems out of place in the Hard Case Crime series.

The greatest flaw of the book is that King examines some of the same issues, specifically the unsolved murder in Maine’s island culture, in his more successful novel “Dolores Claiborne.”

For those readers King writes for, “The Colorado Kid” still retains a little of the old magic of his best novels, but for new readers it represents, not a fun, bad pulp novel, but simply a bad, bad pulp novel.