Title: You Can Run…But You Can’t Hide
Author: Linda Freeny
Publisher: Toplink Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 978-1950540730
Pages: 185
Genre: Fiction / Detective / Mystery
Reviewed by: Jake Bishop

Read Book Review

All the elements of an archetypal mystery come into play in Linda Freeny’s novel, You Can Run…But You Can’t Hide, yet there’s enough variations on the classic gumshoe theme to elevate this book and make it both a fun read and potent page-turner. There’s a smart and savvy detective, but she’s a woman – not a man. There’s a client looking for a missing person – but that client seems a tad mentally unstable. There’s a coterie of murder suspects – but one of them may be dead already. Best of all, there’s an intricately involving plot that doesn’t go out of its way to stack the deck and stock its readers’ mental ponds with obvious red herrings.

T.J. McCall is a private investigator with an interesting pedigree. Her father was a policeman. She studied law, even passed the bar, but eventually decided she didn’t want to be a cop or a mouthpiece. One job was too mind-numbingly repetitive, the other too morally compromising. So she settled on tracking down truth for profit and keeping justice, rather than wins and losses, as her top priority. To her own dismay, in this particular tale she becomes the hunted as well as the hunter.

T. J. goes to work for a woman who’s looking for her missing husband. The oddity is that the husband has been missing for a number of months before she tells anyone about it. Well, that’s one oddity. The other is the woman herself. She’s the heir to a huge fortune and this happens to be her second husband who’s gone missing. As T. J. begins to look into her case and the woman herself, she finds more questions than answers—questions that lead to multiple murder attempts on T. J.’s life. Soon a number of idiosyncratic characters begin to be involved. There’s the famously high-priced New York lawyer who watches over the heiress and her money. There’s a retired CIA man who seems to know more than he shares. There’s a schoolmistress with a history, a nun with a secret, a follower in disguise, T. J.’s ex spouse and her current lover, and more. Not to mention the two previous husbands who were reportedly brothers and who may or may not be dead.

If the aforementioned all seems complicated and somewhat convoluted, you’ll be pleased to know that the author weaves this seemingly crazy quilt plot together with both skill and dexterity. She uses crisp, quick sentences in prose that makes reading easy. Her dialogue has the snap of actual conversations. Individuals’ behaviors and motivations come across as authentic and credible, not merely plot contrivances. Emotional depths are plumbed realistically and no loose ends are left untied. And like the best of tales in this genre, revelations and surprises appear appropriately and with definite impact. Freeny is an excellent author working at the top of her game. You Can Run…But You Can’t Hide is a yarn that will keep you engaged from the first page to the last.