Aaron Decker is married to the beautiful, striking and curiously enigmatic Allison. They seem to have a near perfect union. But Aaron’s idyllic life is shattered when his wife is killed in a shooting spree incident at a local mall just before Christmas. His grief is all-consuming but when he finally steels himself to sort out Allison’s belongings he uncovers a receipt for a hotel stay hundreds of miles away. He fears the worst and his curiosity drives him to embark on a journey of discovery that will lead him into a troubling world of brutal death and wilful deceit as he ventures into the dark heart of his late wife’s hidden life.
Ronald Malfi’s latest is a powerful and insightful piece of storytelling, a study of grief and obsession writ large as Aaron slowly begins to realise that the woman he had been married to for five years was in many ways a complete stranger who kept her tragic past a secret and who was working to resolve childhood traumas in her own clandestine manner. Although the book sets itself up as appealing to Stephen King’s audience, in truth the supernatural element of Come With Me is pleasantly understated. Flickering closet lights and vague hints of phantom apparitions are really the only genre trappings in a story that is in many ways a ‘cold case’ murder investigation undertaken by a determined amateur carrying on his late wife’s work. Piecing together random clues as he visits backwater towns where, he realises, a ruthless serial killer has been brutally murdering teenage girls. Along the way, he meets survivors, families of victims, and people whose lives have been touched by both his wife and the hands of the mysterious killer. Malfi’s crisply-written narrative is beautifully layered and immaculately-structured; our sympathies are always with the tragic, driven Aaron and we are with him every step of the way, picking up on clues, following unlikely leads, and identifying potential suspects and then ruling them out as Aaron discovers even more about the past his wife has never been able to let go.
Come With Me is a terrifically-powerful, atmospheric, and absorbing read that delivers an astonishingly bold and rather beautiful denouement that finally takes the book into the genre territory its publicity appears to be keen to connect it with. Ultimately, whether you’re a fan of crime stories or supernatural fiction, Come With Me is hugely-satisfying, wonderfully readable, and evocative novel that will keep you enthralled and guessing until the very last page.
Come With Me is published by Titan Books on July 20th.
