In Fugitive Red by Jason Star, we read about a man in his mid-forties named Jack who is in a failing marriage with his wife, Maria, he meets with an old friend for business reasons for his real estate job. Him and his successful friend,Rob, used to be in a band and now Jack wanted to help Rob buy an expensive apartment that he was desperate to sell due to his lack of deals in the last few months. His friend who is also married talks to Jack about how he uses an app by the name of “Discreet Hookups”, that is for married people to cheat on each other and Rob uses this app to cheat on his wife and was almost trying to tempt Jack into using it. When Jack gets back to his house his wife and him end up having an altercation where after Jack thinks to himself and sees his relationship is failing, so he goes on the app and finds a person who goes by the username of “Fugitive Red”, him and this woman seem to hit it off and soon schedule a meet up to do illicit activities. When Jack arrives he finds Fugitive Red, who’s real name was Sophie, dead. He tries to keep her alive by giving her mouth to mouth CPR, but instead just gets his DNA all over the crime scene. After the police are called, Jack goes into a state of panic and is soon detained and marked as a person of interest. The detective in the case who is named Nick Balasco is very strict and almost cocky with Jack and makes Jack think that Balasco truly thinks he did it when he obviously didn’t. Jack is almost positive that Sophie’s husband Lawrence did it, due to him being mentioned as abusive and neglecting in their chats. When Jack’s wife finds out about Jack’s case, she immediately says she doesn’t want to be associated with him and sets a restraining order, makes sure he doesn’t see his son (who he is very fond of), and changes all the locks in the house and locks him out of all bank accounts after Jack gets arrested for trying to get back into house and resisting arrest. When he gets arrested Jack gets free legal aid to help him against his charge of resisting arrest. Jack, who was a 7 year sober alcohol addict, calls up one of the people he sponsored in A.A. who’s name was Anthony. Anthony was an ex-cop turned private investigator due to his old heroin addiction. Anthony helps Jack by giving him money,clothes, food, and a place to stay. His most important help to Jack however, was agreeing to be a private investigator for Jack to help prove Lawrence guilty. Later Jack tries to call Anthony when he is out but sees he is not answering or anything. He goes back into Anthony’s house to find Anthony’s dead body. After going into shock again, he cleans the blood in a desperate attempt to not get another case on his hands. No one seems to find out about Anthony’s death until later in the book. With Jack being outraged, he takes matters into his own hands and tries to get Lawrence to confess to his murders on video. This goes south and Jack barges into Lawrence’s house and when Lawrence pulls out a knife and attempts stabbing Jack, Jack chokes Lawrence to death in the heat of the moment to let out the rage of the murders of both his friends. Jack runs away and soon reads on the paper that the killer of Lawrence Ward is at large. He then goes back to Rob while being drunk and threatens Rob with revealing his cheating life to his wife if he doesn’t wire Jack 200 thousand dollars because he believes Rob is the reason he cheated. Rob, with a fear of his family finding out, goes through with it. With Jack being in the lowest point of life, he attempts to take his own life by jumping in front of a train. Which doesn’t work due to him being saved. He is admitted to a mental hospital and is on suicide watch when his public defender, who he previously blocked in an argument and Nick Balasco come to the hospital to clear up that Lawrence was in fact proven to be the killer of both people. Soon after being discharged, Jack’s wife comes back with a changed attitude and even refers Jack to a paid attorney to help Jack get through the other case of killing Lawrence. After it is all cleared up as a kill in self defense, Jack is an innocent man. Life between him and his wife is great. Jack still feels that this change of attitude of his wife is weird and notices that he has been cut off from one of his bank accounts and when he looked into it he saw lots of purchases on the Discreet Hookups website(you need to pay to talk on the website). The dates of the purchases lined up weirdly with the dates of the killings and then when he checked up with his son’s babysitter, he saw that on the night of Sophie’s homicide Maria had scheduled for the babysitter to take care of his child. After confronting Maria about it and getting it on video, he finds out that Maria had also been cheating on him with Lawrence and that it was in fact her and Lawrence’s plan to get rid of them both so they could be together. After this Maria takes Jack’s phone with the recording, destroys it, and runs away after knocking Jack out. Soon after investigation they find that Maria was Fugitive Red, and that she had taken the 200k out of their joint account and fled the area. They never found Maria, but the now changed Jack lived a happy life with his son and job back and tried to repair his life the best he could.
This was a really good read with lots of changes in the plot and it was fun to read every small part of it. This was genuinely one of the best reads I've had and it really painted a picture of how dangerous dating apps and online meet ups can get. It also really helped prove a point of how there always needs to be hope in anything you do and that things do get better. Though some of the twists were a little bit predictable, there were so many it didn’t matter and the major ones weren’t too predictable. Every page of this book was thrilling and I thurley enjoyed the fine details and the work that the author put into making the book really nice and exciting.
I really liked this read and how everything in the book just meshed together to make an immersive storyline. My advice to future readers is to really pay attention to what goes on in the book, because a lot of their little pesky details might show up again in later parts of the book and won’t make lots of sense if you don’t pay attention when first coming across. Overall though this was a really good book and I liked the book the second I started reading that first page and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a thrilling mystery book about a man who’s life completely falls apart because of something he can’t control .
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