I Picked Up If I Run Before Bed and Finished It in Two Nights

I am not a fast reader, and I want that on the table before I say anything else, because the rest of this is going to sound like bragging. One novel every ten days is my usual pace. That is not a rule I invented for effect. It is what thirty-one years of running a school library left me with: an evening habit, a pencil in my hand, and a small notebook on the side table where I write down the day I started a book and the day I finished it.

So when I tell you that I picked up If I Run by Terri Blackstock on a Thursday night and closed it on Friday night, you should know what that cost me. It cost me a Friday. I started it before bed the way I start everything, and the next thing I knew Glenn was switching off the lamp over his chair and asking whether I intended to sit up all night. I did not. I went to bed, and I finished the book the following evening. Three hundred and twenty pages, two sittings. That is the only Blackstock novel I have ever read in two nights, and I have read several since.

I had stopped trusting covers, and that is the plain truth of where I was in March of 2023. I had bought three novels in a row on the strength of a back cover and put all three in the box for the church sale before the second week was out. So I came to this one with a low opinion of blurbs and a short list of things I was willing to put up with. What sold me was not the cover. It was the length of the thing and the fact that the description did not waste my time.

Here is what the listing will tell you, and it is most of what you need. Zondervan published it in paperback in February of 2016. Three hundred and twenty pages, English, book one of a three-book series. Two names appear in the description: Casey Cox and Dylan Roberts. Casey is the one on the run. I am not going to tell you what Dylan is up to, because that is part of the reading and I do not spoil books for people.

What I will tell you is how it read. Blackstock keeps the chapters short enough that you keep telling yourself you will stop at the end of the next one, and then you do not. That is not a compliment I hand out often. Most suspense novels I pick up have one good evening in them and then I can feel the machinery working. This one held me straight through to the last page, and when I closed it I sat there a minute and thought about how long it had been since a book took a whole evening away from me.

Three hundred and twenty pages, and I read it in two sittings. In thirty-one years of putting books into other people's hands, I can count on one hand the novels that did that to me.

I put it in front of the book group that May, and that is the real test, not my own two nights. Eight women, the second Tuesday, the fellowship room with the bad coffee. Dottie, who is seventy-four and my longest reading friend, announced by the second evening that she had the whole thing figured out. She always says that. I have learned not to react either way, because reacting is how you give it away.

The meeting ran the usual length, and the agreement was broad, which does not always happen. The one honest complaint, and it is mine as much as theirs, is that the speed of it leaves less room for the quiet parts. A book that moves this fast does not stop to let you sit with a character for a page and a half. If what you love is the slow middle of a story, you will feel the absence of it here. That is the trade Blackstock makes, and she makes it on purpose.

The second thing to know, and I would rather tell you now than have you write me about it, is that book one does not tie everything off. It is the first of three, and it ends where a first of three ends. Plan on reading on. The series in order is If I Run, then If I'm Found, then If I Live. I read all three that spring, in order, which is the only way I have ever read a series and the only way I would recommend.

The listing also notes that it was made into a Lifetime movie. I have not seen it and cannot tell you whether it holds to the book. I can tell you that a story I finished in two sittings does not need a screen to keep hold of me, and I would just as soon remember it the way I read it in the green chair.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to take it if you want a book that pulls you along and does not ask much of you beyond turning the page. Hand it to the reader who has been disappointed by three covers in a row and wants a sure thing for a weekend. Hand it to someone going on a trip who wants to be occupied on the plane. Do not hand it to the reader who wants the whole matter settled by the last page, because it will not be, and she will come back to you annoyed. Do not hand it to anyone who wants a mystery built on quiet observation, either. This is a book about motion, and it is the one I reach for when somebody asks me for a Blackstock to start with. If you want a detective working slowly through old evidence, this is not that book, and I would point you elsewhere. And if you are the sort who reads the last chapter first, I would ask you to trust me and not do it here. Start it on a Thursday if you can spare the Friday.