The Colorado Kid

The Colorado Kid is a mystery novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 2005 by the Hard Case Crime imprint.

The book was written for a specialist crime publisher and first appeared as a single paperback edition, with an illustrated reissue following in 2019, and its shape is deliberately unlike the rest of King's work: the mystery itself is not solved, and the novel is more interested in what the impossibility does to the people who live with it. Twenty-five years later, the two veteran journalists who covered the case use it to test a young intern, who is a postgraduate and thinks she knows how a story is supposed to be assembled. What they want from her is not a solution but an argument about whether the facts can be made to mean anything, and the discussion about the dead man takes in their town, their trade and the difference between reporting and knowing. A television series loosely inspired by the novel, titled Haven, ran on Syfy between 2010 and 2015.