Book Review: Run Away, Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben burst onto the scene with his thriller, Tell No One. He had already to his credit a series with sports agent Myron Bolitar as a central character, but standalone Tell No One catapulted him into the pulp fiction stratosphere with its never-let-go, twist-a-minute plot, so much so that if you look him up online, chances are descriptors on search pages will list him as (author of Tell No One).

Let’s also talk about his Myron Bolitar novels (sports agent with that awful name), featuring sidekick Windsor Horne Lockwood III, an affable playboy with some questionable tendencies. If Coben’s standalone novels spoke of his adroit penmanship of introducing more plot twists in a story than there are potholes in Bengaluru, the Bolitar novels also were testament to his ability to create believable, reliable, relatable characters. The easy camaraderie, office banter, and a compulsive need to do right by the world were the hallmarks of the Bolitar novels.

Tell No One was made into a movie by Hollywood, and if you subscribe to Netflix, chances are you will also have watched the Michael C Hall eight-part series, Safe, based on another novel by Coben. But this review is about his latest novel, Run Away, and boy, was it a damp squib for someone who’s been a Coben fangirl for close to 20 years.

In Run Away, Simon Greene and Ingrid, his wife, live a cosy life somewhere in New Jersey. They have three children. Their perfect suburban life is shattered when Phoebe, their eldest, falls into a life of drugs and substance abuse and runs away from home. What follows next is multiple plots colliding with a slew of unsavoury characters, who lead Simon down a spiralling maze of situations to find a daughter who seems determined to not be found.

As the novel opens, Simon locates his runaway daughter in Central Park in New York. A junkie who chooses to give up a protected life with her parents and siblings, Phoebe now busks in Central Park for pennies to feed her drug habit. What is this distance that separates father and daughter, even though they are close enough to see each other physically? What turn of events prompted the estrangement?

Have there been any attempts made at reconciliation? And why isn’t Ingrid as invested in finding Phoebe and bringing her home? Coben resorts to his tried-and-tested trope of frequent twists, but maybe because I have read most of his older novels, I could see the twists coming from a mile away.

Coben’s novels are always fast-paced, making them easy, quick reads, but I found myself staggering through this.

The plot in Run Away thickens as expected, because there needs to be a buildup before the culmination in a thriller, but in this, it’s as weak as gruel without enough starch to thicken it, however much you boil it. The secondary plot that crisscrosses with the first, and then the next about a secret cult that comes out of left field, require a forced suspension of disbelief.

The plot lines entangle in ways that seem too convoluted, too forced. For a novel that has at its heart a parent’s love for his child, and the hoops he is willing to jump through to save his child from a life of abuse, Run Away has no character that is compelling and relatable, save Elena, an FBI agent-turned-private investigator with a mysterious backstory.

All characters here seem to be mere pawns in the constantly forking plot, making it hard to invest in any single one of them.

Although Run Away has all the elements of a thriller — action, danger, mystery, shades of grey, skeletons in the closet, chicanery, and a host of situations that keep the plot going — the novel doesn’t do a good job of stitching it all together to make it a good read.

There is the customary ‘surprising’ reveal towards the end that is a hallmark of his novels, but by the time it arrives, you either won’t care, or will have seen it coming so you are glad the novel’s come to an end. Pity, because Harlan Coben’s thrillers defined the genre of the thriller with multiple plot twists and surprising reveals at one point.

This one’s merely ho-hum on the thriller scale. I would rather read his older novels again.