Wow. I haven’t written a book review in sooooo long, it’s not funny.

It’s not that I haven’t been reading, it’s just that my priorities have lain elsewhere. Now I’m getting closer to retiring (at the ripe old age of 57), I have a little more time on my hands, so perhaps the good old book review will return on a more regular basis. We’ll see.

Where He Can’t Find You is a gripping modern horror story for young adults by Darcy Coates, a talented and prolific Australian horror author who made her debut self publishing, was recognized and signed to a publishing deal, and hasn’t looked back since.

Our protagonist, Abby Ward, is a teenage girl living in a small town called Doubtful, a dying American burg where cars and electronics are strangely unreliable, a town which is long past its boom years since the mines closed. Abby and her friends are amateur detectives, chasing down the town’s fabled Stitcher, a serial killer who kidnaps people in the night and then returns them as sewn together body parts, sometimes combined with the body parts of other missing individuals. The Stitcher always uses red thread for the task.

It isn’t long before Abby’s younger sister Hope is taken by the Stitcher, and Abby and her friends start a desperate manhunt to locate her before she is killed. This brings them into direct contact with Charles Vickers, a man who is believed to be the Stitcher because of his particular creepiness and penchant for buying red thread. The local police have questioned him in the past but haven’t found anything to hold him on, however…

Where He Can’t Find You is a gripping young adult novel of small town horror, with one foot in the real world and one foot firmly in the fantastical. Coates introduces us to a cast of interesting young friends intent on finding the missing Hope and uncovering the mystery of Charles Vickers and the Stitcher before Hope is lost forever. The story chugs along at a rollicking pace, revealing more and more about the protagonists and antagonists as all good novels do, without overwhelming the reader with too many characters or too much overwhelming logic.

Yes, there are questions as to why this serial killer has been allowed to get away with so much for so long, and why the local cops haven’t swept the sealed off mines to locate said killer by now, but none of that matters in this thrilling young adult horror tale that keeps you enraptured for all of its 395 pages. I’m not going to spoil it any more than I already have, but needless to say this was a fun read and good for anyone looking for a thrilling horror story that isn’t too demanding on your time or brain cells. I’m looking forward to seeing a movie version of it someday…