You Can Run by Steve Mosby

Orion, 336 pages, $15.99 (c2017, paperback ed. 2019)

How would you classify a book in which there is a serial killer on the run, gruesomely stored bodies, a police detective who “senses” things, and a repugnancy that is revealed towards the end of the book? Horror? Crime? Supernatural? I’m smooshing all those labels in a big red bowl and serving it with “You Can Run,” Steve Mosby’s main dish.

I’ve read one other of Mosby’s books, and it had a very similar mix of elements. He is tremendously good at getting his reader to turn the pages. (Faster, faster.) He is also pretty grim reading. You can turn away, but you can’t unread!

I rarely issue this warning, but I think it is warranted here because Mosby has several reveals. If you’d rather be surprised, go no further.

DI Will Turner, serial killer John Edward Blythe, and author Jeremy Townsend are the characters whose stories we follow. (DI Emma Beck is in there, but she mostly is background. Pity.)

DI Will Turner has “intuitions” that help him process his cases, and that brands him as peculiar by his colleagues, except for his partner DI Emma Beck. Beck is a stalwart, loyal friend and makes for good wallpaper. One fine day, the “Red River Killer” case falls into their laps when the two partners follow-up on an accident scene. A car has crashed into the garage of a house. Forget the crash, forget the driver, because in the garage is a shackled, barely alive, naked woman. She is Amanda Cassidy, the latest missing woman and presumed victim of the RRK. Over seventeen years, there have been fifteen victims, counting Amanda Cassidy.

The owner of the home and garage is John Edward Blythe. According to people who know him, he could provide the template of a serial killer: quiet, looming, antisocial, grim, minds his own business. But he is not there in the home.

After some internal wrangling at police headquarters, Will and Emma are assigned the task of tracking down Blythe. But Will cannot let go of the bodies — I’ll spare you the details — found in Blythe’s home. There is a secret Will is keeping about one of the victims. Sooner rather than later, Mosby fesses up the connection, but in the meantime there is suspenseful vagueness.

Will and Emma track Blythe, a course sometimes determined by Will’s “feelings.” I have to say that it might appear that author Mosby took an easy way out by having Will figure out things that would be hard to discover or slower to appear using more conventional thinking, but I enjoyed the mystic divination.

Jeremy Townsend provides a writerly stand-in for author Mosby, maybe. Certainly there are some writerly asides about publishing and writing. Jeremy’s participation in the story is as the husband of one of the victims, Melanie Townsend, who vanished ten years earlier. He was briefly known for writing a crime book, “What Happened in the Woods.” The chapters he appears in become stranger and stranger. He knows something. He is wracked with guilt over something. His soul is withering away because of something. Cough it up, Jeremy, for Gawd’s sake!

Despite the grimness and griminess of the crimes, I thought Mosby did a good job of creating an entertaining story. This is ironic since Mosby writes, ironically:

“In much the same way the newspapers amped up the gory details to sell copies, these books were filled with violence as entertainment, and it all felt the same. Dead women shifting units.”

Although the men in the story appear not to understand women very well and the women were diminished by flat personalities, I have no problem recommending this book as a thriller. And the last chapter was a soul-cleansing winner.