THE DARK WEB SCAM

This ninth installment finds the series’ leads in a deep thicket of revenge after a simple scam goes wrong.

Philip and Carrie Benson, aka The Travelers, are longtime grifters currently living in a suburban home outside Denver, Colorado, with a hacker named Merlin Jimenez. Their latest scam is a website called Death Becomes You. People can pay $5,000 in bitcoin for the Bensons to whack someone—however, they don’t actually commit the murder. When a potential client asks for crime reporter Robin Simons to die in what seems like an overdose, the scammers become suspicious that the FBI has found them. Researching the client turns up Dr. John Pollock, a dentist in Cornwell, Indiana. The Travelers raise their fee to $12,000, which Pollock pays. They don’t know that Pollock uses his dental office to sell OxyContin pills provided by drug lord Dylan Anderson. Anderson, annoyed that Pollock would try to kill the reporter sniffing around their business on his own, plans to eliminate the Bensons. The hit man creates collateral damage before the Bensons take him down. Philip and Carrie then visit Cornwell to exact revenge and scoop up enough cash for their next vacation. King’s smoothly executed and addictive series returns, offering cinematic action and a high body count. This time, the plot twist involves a ring of sex traffickers. What begins as genuine concern for a teen named Gypsy escalates into war against a powerful thug and his crew. Dark humor prevails, as when the Travelers find the shabby apartment of their targets and Philip notes, “When they say crime doesn’t pay, they were talking about these two.” The violence is never glamorized (“He shifted his weight, heard the shot as he felt the bullet explode through his back into his gut”). The finale suggests the Travelers may have more vigilantism in their future.

This exceptionally violent, well-conceived series continues to explore the moral gray zone.