Summary
Run Away is a quintessential Harlan Coben thriller, but even by those standards it’s impressively dense and demented.
Every Netflix subscriber has gotten used to the idea of a new Harlan Coben thriller to see in the new year, and by now, everyone knows what to expect from them. Run Away doesn’t rewrite the rulebook in that regard, but it does strain the format to its breaking point, delivering eight episodes of inexplicably entertaining absurdity so densely layered with interlocking mysteries and soapy plot turns that you’ll finish it and think you’ve landed in 2027. And then you’ll presumably forget all about it.
This is the way of things. As in 2024’s Fool Me Once and 2025’s Missing You, Run Away finds an ostensibly normal bloke with a seemingly picturesque life landing in the middle of an extremely complex web of trauma that upends his entire existence. The twist this time is that he’s not played by Richard Armitage – who isn’t in this at all! – but instead by an appropriately stressed-out James Nesbitt (Coben’s Stay Close), whose missing drug addict daughter turns out to be the least of his problems.
Simon (Nesbitt) runs a flourishing finance company with his sister-in-law, Yvonne (Ingrid Oliver, The Thursday Murder Club), and is happily married to beautiful pediatrician Ingrid (Minnie Driver, Emily in Paris). Together they have three children: Anya (Ellie Henry), university student Sam (Adrian Greensmith, Harlan Coben’s Shelter), and wayward drug addict Paige (Ellie de Lange), who at the start of the season hasn’t been seen for about six months. When Simon is lured to a park where she’s busking, he’s taunted by her abusive, enabling boyfriend, Aaron Corval (Thomas Flynn, Red, White & Royal Blue), and batters him in full view of a crowd of witnesses, including a fitness YouTuber who ensures his social media virality. Thanks to that bit of notoriety, when Aaron subsequently turns up dead, Simon immediately becomes the prime suspect.
This is only the tip of a thoroughly demented iceberg. Immediately, Detectives Isaac Fagbenle (Alfred Enoch, Foundation) and Ruby Todd (Amy Gledhill, Sex Education) begin investigating the case, while Simon simultaneously tries to clear his name with the help of private investigator Elena Ravenscroft (Ruth Jones), who is investigating a separate missing person, but given this is a Harlan Coben thriller it’s safe to assume that the two things are not only connected to each other but to a litany of other subplots involving multiple supporting characters. There are local vigilantes, drug dealers, religious cults, and itinerant, fresh-faced assassins working their way through a kill list of connected victims. And that isn’t even the half of it.
Let me be frank here: Run Away is pretty comfortably better than recent Coben thrillers, including the weird supernatural whodunit Lazarus, which was on Prime Video, but it’s not so much better that it’ll convert anyone who’s rightly sick of the way these things work. While the series can’t be said to be predictable – it eventually coalesces into such a ludicrously tangled narrative that it’d be almost impossible to explain to another person without sounding like a lunatic – it’s definitely reminiscent of its predecessors in the way it unfolds. Expect a lot of climactic cliffhanger montages that continuously upend everything you thought you knew about… well, everything.
But the cast is very solid, and the plot, while preposterous, is grounded enough that it isn’t actively frustrating or laughable, at least not all the time. And the familiarity viewers now have with quintessential Coben storytelling tricks has become part of the fun. Pretty much every scene is packed with details that you can’t quite decide are meaningful clues or personal peccadillos, and untangling the knots is a surprisingly good time. It’s a wonder it holds together as well as it does.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still psychotic in its relentless efforts to shock and surprise, whether that’s through violence, awful revelations, or highly sensationalised plot swerves. There are plot holes big enough to sprain an ankle in if you pay enough attention, which is never advised with these shows. The point is to get swept along by it all, to buy into the plights of the characters and the deeper ideas it’s scraping away at beneath it all, some of which are kind of compelling. How well do you really know your loved ones? How far might you go to protect them? Is there such a thing as too far? What does it take to be a good father, a good husband, a good neighbour? Has there ever been a private investigator with a normal-sounding name?
These are the big questions, and while I can’t say that Harlan Coben’s Run Away answers them all satisfactorily, it certainly makes an energetic effort. Eight episodes of a streaming series usually feel like too many, but I was never bored with this one, not even for a moment, and that has to count for something. Just don’t expect too much. Or think too much. Happy New Year.
