The Colorado Kid is a mystery novel by American writer Stephen King, published by the Hard Case Crime imprint in October 2005. The book was initially issued as a paperback-only edition by the specialty crime and mystery publishing house, marking King's first work for the imprint. The cover art was created by Glen Orbik, a frequent Hard Case Crime illustrator known for his pulp-style paintings.
The novel is structured as a story within a story. On a small island off the coast of Maine, two veteran newspapermen, Vince Teague and Dave Bowie, recount a decades-old unsolved mystery to their young intern, Stephanie McCann. In 1980, the body of an unidentified man was found on a beach. The investigation that followed yielded a series of strange, seemingly contradictory clues — a Russian coin, a pack of cigarettes missing one cigarette, a stomach full of fish despite a ferry crossing — but no clear resolution. Over a year later, the man was finally identified as a Colorado resident, yet the core mysteries of how and why he died remained unanswered.
Unlike most of King's work, The Colorado Kid contains no supernatural elements. It is a deliberate homage to the classic hardboiled mystery genre, and its central theme is the nature of mystery itself — the idea that some questions simply do not have tidy answers. The novel's unconventional, open-ended conclusion divided readers upon release but has since been appreciated as a meditation on storytelling and the human need for resolution.
The Colorado Kid gained renewed attention when it was loosely adapted into the Syfy television series Haven, which premiered in 2010. The show took only the barest elements of the novel — a small Maine coastal town, a mysterious death, and a pair of newspapermen — and built an entirely new supernatural mythology around them. Hard Case Crime reissued the novel in an illustrated paperback edition in May 2019.
