Lisey's story was such an impressive thriller, it was hard to see where Stephen King could go next.

The author decided that a change of scene would be a good idea and has ditched the usual Maine setting for a new location - the sunshine state of Florida.

Just as Ian McEwan left Oxford behind and moved to London to give his fiction a new lease of life before writing Saturday, King decided on the same technique.

He and his wife Tabitha now split their time between Maine and Florida, and the switch to the coast appears to have paid off.

Duma Key tells the story of Edgar Freemantle, a multi-millionaire building contractor who suffers a brain injury and loses his right arm in a digger accident.

During his slow recovery, he struggles to manage the bouts of anger he suffers and his wife - not surprisingly - decides to divorce him after he has attacked her on a number of occasions.

After King was knocked down by a van in 1999, he suffered traumatic injuries, and the author draws on this personal experience to capture vividly Freemantle's rehabilitation.

The millionaire is feeling sorry for himself, so his therapist recommends a change of scene, and he moves from his home town of Minnesota to Duma Key, a deserted island off Florida's Gulf Coast.

Freemantle rents a beach house named Salmon Point, which he christens Big Pink, and starts to renew his interest in painting.

He feels compelled to paint, and his paintings begin to take on a mystical quality, with the artist foreseeing events, including his ex-wife's affair with his old friend Tom Riley.

Freemantle then makes friends with Jerome Wireman, the caretaker of Elizabeth Eastlake, an eccentric old woman who is a native of Duma Key, and the pair begin to investigate the mysterious past of Mrs Eastlake and her five sisters who lived on Duma Key in the 1920s.

It turns out that Elizabeth was a child art prodigy who suffered a bad injury at the age of two, and after the accident began to draw fantastic pictures that somehow manifested themselves in the real world.

As Freemantle tries to uncover the mysterious history of the Eastlakes, dark forces emerge on the island, which appear to be coming from his paintings and a psychic ability his phantom limb has caused.

There comes a point in every Stephen King novel when you have to take a deep breath and suspend your disbelief - and that happens quite quickly once Freemantle has moved to Duma Key.

But King is a master storyteller and knows the bizarre, supernatural plot twists will not be tolerated by the reader without a strong character to carry the action.

Fortunately, Edgar Freemantle is very clearly defined in the opening chapters and the first-person narrative carries the reader along.

After being crushed by a digger and dumped by his wife, Freemantle is a narrator you can sympathise with, and I was behind him all the way, as the dark forces of Duma Key tried to sweep him under.

King is not a painter - he's a writer - so he is not quite as sure of his material as when the novel is about the writing process - for example in Misery and Lisey's Story.

But Duma Key is King's first novel set in Florida and the new location has prompted him to write an involving and inevitably disturbing 500-page story.

After finishing this, you might think twice next time you're tempted to pick up your paint brushes.