If I Run (if I Run, #1)

If I Run is the first book in Terri Blackstock's If I Run trilogy, a suspense novel told in alternating first-person perspectives. The story follows Casey Cox, a 25-year-old woman fleeing a murder charge she insists is false, and Dylan Roberts, the private investigator hired to find her.

The novel opens with Casey washing blood from her shoes in her Shreveport, Louisiana, apartment. Her best friend, Brent Pace, has been stabbed to death, and Casey found his body. Rather than call the police, she packs a duffel bag with essentials and a cigar box containing $12,000 inherited from her late father, abandons her car, and takes a Greyhound bus out of town. Through her internal narration, Casey insists she did not kill Brent and reveals a deep distrust of police, implying that the system turned on her family years earlier.

In Dallas, Casey checks into a cheap motel and briefly considers suicide before rejecting the idea because of her mother, who has severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and her older sister Hannah, who has a six-month-old baby named Emma. A flashback reveals the source of Casey's trauma: At age 12, she found her father, Andrew Cox, a Shreveport police officer, hanging dead in their living room. His death was ruled a suicide, but Casey has always believed he was murdered, citing signs of a struggle that the investigation ignored. She continues to Durant, Oklahoma, where she dyes her hair, learns from a hotel computer that she has been named a person of interest, and obtains a fake ID under the name Grace Newland.

At a Trailways bus station, Casey buys a ticket toward Atlanta. On the bus, she sits beside Miss Lucy, a kind elderly woman moving to Shady Grove, Georgia, to live with her daughter Sandra Daly. Lucy shows Casey a photograph of her granddaughter Laura Daly, who vanished two years earlier at age 14 after a youth group bonfire. Police ruled Laura a runaway, but the family insists she would never have left voluntarily. Lucy invites Casey to Shady Grove, and Casey, drawn by the prospect of friendship, decides to go.

The narrative shifts to Dylan Roberts, a 30-year-old Army veteran who served three deployments as a criminal investigator in the Army's Criminal Investigations Division (CID). He was honorably discharged due to severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Brent's wealthy parents hire Dylan to find Casey, with Detective Gordon Keegan and his partner, Detective Sy Rollins, endorsing the arrangement. Dylan reviews the crime scene evidence and notes troubling inconsistencies: The murder weapon was found in Casey's car, but the angle of certain wounds seems difficult for someone of Casey's small stature to inflict on the much taller Brent. Her bloody knee print near his body suggests she knelt beside him, behavior more consistent with discovering a body than committing murder.

In Atlanta, Casey receives a thumb drive that Brent mailed to her apartment before his death, forwarded by Hannah. The files include a video interview Brent conducted with Sara Meadows, a clerk in the Shreveport Police Department's evidence room who has stage-four cancer. Meadows reveals that Casey's father had been investigating corruption within the department: detectives taking bribes and extorting money from criminal enterprises. Within three weeks of uncovering this, Andrew Cox was dead. Meadows names Keegan and Rollins as the corrupt officers who suppressed evidence, including signs of a physical struggle before his hanging. The thumb drive also links Keegan's expensive lifestyle to a shell company traced to a realty firm in Grand Cayman, suggesting money laundering. Casey realizes Brent was murdered because his investigation threatened Keegan and Rollins. She drives to Shady Grove.

Casey gets a job at a cell phone repair shop and begins building a quiet life. At work, she checks a repaired phone belonging to a customer named Frank Dotson and notices old newspaper clippings about Laura Daly in his photographs. His wife, Arelle, wears a cameo necklace resembling one Laura wore. Dotson's browser history shows he has read every article about Laura, and he has two prior domestic violence arrests. When Casey visits his house and knocks on a boarded-up basement window, she hears a baby crying inside, though her coworker confirms the Dotsons have never had children.

Meanwhile, Dylan catches Keegan watching the Meadows interview video on his laptop at the police station. When Dylan arranges to meet Meadows at her home that evening, he arrives to find her shot dead. Hannah warns Dylan that the people he works with cannot be trusted. Casey mails a copy of the thumb drive to Dylan, postmarked from Atlanta to protect her location. After reviewing its contents, Dylan concludes that Keegan likely killed both Brent and Meadows to protect himself. He contacts Casey through an anonymous e-mail, expressing his growing belief in her innocence, and she responds, challenging him to pursue the truth.

One evening, Casey goes to the empty Dotson house, removes a board from a basement window, breaks the glass, and calls out. A girl's voice begs for help and identifies herself as Laura Daly. Before Casey can break through the interior barrier, police arrive and arrest her for breaking and entering. They search the house and find no one, concluding Casey is delusional. Miss Lucy posts her bond. Keegan then informs Dylan that Casey has been accessing social media from servers near both Atlanta and Auburn, Alabama. Dylan maps the overlapping area and circulates Casey's alias through Georgia police departments. The Shady Grove police confirm that Grace Newland lives there, recently arrested at the Dotson house. Dylan drives to Shady Grove and reveals Grace's true identity to the Dalys. Lucy fiercely defends Casey, and after Dylan leaves, she calls Casey to warn her.

Casey returns to the Dotson house with bolt cutters. She breaks inside and hides when Frank and Arelle come home. She overhears Frank say he needs to check on someone downstairs and Arelle reply that she does not want to take care of the baby. After they fall asleep, Casey discovers a camouflaged door in the basement concealing an old coal chute. Inside, Laura lies skeletal and battered next to a sleeping baby. Casey tells Laura she has come to get her out.

As they attempt to escape, the baby's cries wake Dotson, who charges downstairs and attacks. Casey fights him with the bolt cutters while Laura swings a steel pipe. Dylan, who had been watching Casey's apartment and noticed her car near the Dotsons' house, breaks open the cellar doors from outside. He helps Laura and the baby escape, then goes back inside to subdue Dotson. Arelle fires a shotgun that strikes and kills Dotson. Outside in the rain, Casey and Dylan face each other for the first time. His phone rings: It is Keegan, flying to Shady Grove to take over the case. Casey sees the name on the display, turns, and walks to her car. Dylan, now convinced Keegan intends to kill Casey rather than bring her to trial, watches her drive away and does not stop her. Laura and her baby are reunited with Sandra and Lucy.

Casey drives north through the night. She calls her mother to assure her she is alive and innocent. In a significant shift from her earlier skepticism, she tells her mother she has discovered that God is real. She discards the phone, swaps her license plate, and continues north, planning to find another identity and another place to hide. The novel ends with Casey still a fugitive, taking comfort in the knowledge that Laura was rescued and that Keegan has not yet won. Her story continues in If I'm Found.