Writers are obsessed with other writers. So many of the greats have, somewhere in their oeuvre, at least one novel in which an author is either writing a book, or is struggling with writer’s block. It is a narrative writers relish: that somebody can make their fortune from nothing other than telling stories, and trying to tell them well.

For King, it is a rich vein that he has mined on more than one occasion. Some of his most enduring works feature writers: Salem’s Lot, It, The Shining, The Dark Half and many more feature writers of either novels or plays. But King’s most famous work about an author is Misery, a truly terrifying look at what happens when a keen fan strays onto the wrong side of obsession. It is commonly read as a metaphor for addiction, but can also be taken at face value as an investigation into the love that fans feel for the writers who have changed their lives.

It is that same part of the vein that King draws from here, in the follow-up to Mr Mercedes, last year’s crime thriller. In that book, retired detective Bill Hodges chased down the mass-murdering psychopath Brady Hartsfield, leaving him in a coma. By the time this sequel begins, Hodges and his associates have formed the titular investigation agency, which eschews criminal cases in favour of mysteries that will never involve the police. It is the thrill of the chase that King wants to capture, rather than the nitty-gritty of crime‑scene dusting.

Finders Keepers introduces us to Morris Bellamy, as big a fan of the (invented) novelist John Rothstein as you could imagine. Rothstein is American literary royalty, a towering amalgam of Roth, Salinger and Updike.His fame comes from his Runner books, a trilogy that tips its hat to Updike’s Rabbit novels. But Morris – who is nursing, in true Kingian style, a burgeoning tendency towards psychopathy – hates the third novel. He has heard rumours that Rothstein wrote other books, and keeps them in a vault at his home. Wanting to read them, he does the natural thing: he murders his hero and steals the first drafts, burying them under a tree near his home until the heat on the crime dies down.

When Morris goes to prison for an unrelated (and truly heinous) crime, the notebooks are abandoned to rot. Forty years later, they’re found by Pete Saubers, a teenager who now lives in Morris’s old house, along with the money Morris also stole from Rothstein’s vault. Pete puts the money to good use, saving his family from financial strife (caused, in a delicious chain of consequence, by the opening events of Mr Mercedes), and he too falls in literary love with the writer who created the notebooks. Eventually Morris gets out of prison, and all he has been dreaming of during his incarceration is getting those notebooks. Cue: the chase.

Structurally, the book is an almost constant build of momentum, growing in pace and tension until it finally explodes. That much is similar to Mr Mercedes. But, unlike that book, this is very much not Bill Hodges’s novel. He doesn’t appear until near the halfway point, like some detective-ex-machina. By the book’s close, it’s abundantly clear that he isn’t the focus of this series: that honour belongs to the coma-bound Brady. These two novels are about repercussions: the effects of Brady’s actions, of the recession, of injury and illness, of retirement. They are about leaving the past behind, and yet how it will always come back to haunt you.

Which brings us back to the theme of writers. Morris wants to read Rothstein’s unpublished work in order to discover that the book he disliked was an aberration. Morris may not have developed, but writers do; and we have to go with them, to see where they’ll take us. That’s the greatest joy of this book: watching as King still makes it all seem so effortless, and 55 novels in, manages to thrill with every page.

• To order Finders Keepers for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.