‘Red’ a viscerally potent book

IN THE RED, by Regan C. Ashbaugh, Pocket Books, 468 pages, $24.

Maine’s Regan C. Ashbaugh has combined two backgrounds into a viscerally potent novel of murder and suspense.

Ashbaugh is vice president of a major international brokerage firm in Portland and a volunteer firefighter in South Portland. This second novel is about a murderer who cruelly torches his victims, all of whom are tied into a Wall Street investment firm named Morson Grayhead.

Set in Westchester County as well as New York City and its New Jersey suburbs, the novel features the efforts of Westchester County Fire Marshal Jake Ferguson and his partner, Don Ederling, to solve the fiery deaths.

Ashbaugh quickly brings us into the grisly deaths of two spouses of Morson Grayhead executives. The wives are tied up, raped, doused in gasoline and then the killer sets fire to their hair as he leaves charred corpses.

Jake, a 42-year-old widower who is being prodded into dating again by his partner, is assigned the task of finding the pyromaniac — and why he has set out on this trail of arson and murder.

Are the killings in revenge for some past act by the investment firm? Or are they simply fueled by greed — by someone who hopes to make a “killing” on the Wall Street market by driving the stock price of Morson Grayhead down?

Ashbaugh introduces us to several memorable characters — ruthless Severin Rybeck, chief executive officer of the investment firm; his wife, Lianne, a moneyed ice princess; Warren Parks, a travel executive and friend of the Rybecks’ estranged son, Scott; and Chandler “Chan” Boutet, a former Secret Service agent-turned-bodyguard-and-chaffeur for Severin.

How the Rybecks react to the first two killings sets the stage for the fast-paced developments in the plot. Both of the wives were killed while their husbands were on business trips. When Jake suggests that a serial killer may be at work and attempts to have Severin warn his executives of danger to their spouses, he is met by a flat refusal. Then another fiery murder takes place, another wife is torched, and Jake’s fury brands Rybeck as uncaring about his people and results in Rybeck’s removal.

The pace of the novel is fast-moving except that it does get bogged down with too much detail about stocks and even more detail about firemanship. For example, Ashbaugh provides a vivid description of firemen reaching a fire scene, but overreaches with this description:

“Frankie wedged a haligan between the door and the frame and held the knob with a free hand, while Beau struck it with the hammer end of his ax. Known as the irons, the haligan-ax combination is not always ideal.”

There is no question that Ashbaugh is thoroughly familiar with fire scenes and with the stock market, but he loads too much of that knowledge on us and slows the plot.

But he does pick it up with a quick-developing romance between schoolteacher Valerie Medforth and Jake. And that romance gets drawn into the plot as Val is kidnapped and held by the murderer.

Ashbaugh neatly ties in the various elements — the dysfunctional Rybecks, their son Scott, the murderer and a variety of lesser characters — as the novel roars through a series of surprising twists and turns to a fiery climax.

This is a worthy followup to Ashbaugh’s debut novel, “Downtick,” and it is to be hoped that the central character of Jake Ferguson will carry on in successive novels.

Bill Roach is a free-lance writer with Maine roots who now lives in Florida.