On a cold and rainy weekend in Northern California, I curled up on my sofa with a cat on either side of me and binge-watched all eight hours of Harlen Coben’s Run Away on Netflix.

AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Coben has written nearly forty books – well, they’re not books actually; they’re more like Rube Goldberg contraptions in print. They all run to formula: something “weird” happens to someone “normal” and sends that person on a twist-filled journey where everyone they know – their spouse, their kids, their best friend, their boss, their neighbors – drop the mask and reveal sordid jaw-dropping secrets until every relationship is tested, ruined or strengthened, and a lot of people die, until FINALLY the GREAT BIG secret is unveiled, which makes everyone’s jaw drop lower than it ever has dropped before. 

It has become an annual tradition for Netflix to drop a new Coben adaptation on the streamer on New Year’s Day. There are about a dozen of them now, and the only real difference between them is the language in which they are spoken (English, French, Spanish even Polish!). Some are pretty fun. I’m thinking about Safe, where Michael C. Hall’s gated community becomes anything but secure. Or The Stranger, where Richard Armitage’s golf game suffers almost as much as his marriage. Or Stay Close, where Cush Jumbo learns that long-buried secrets have a way of turning up. 

But some of them are awful. I’m thinking of Fool Me Once, with its ridiculous “nanny cam” hook and Joanna Lumley trying to play it straight. Or Missing You, the only thing about which I can remember is the title. And now comes Run Away, the first eight-part adaptation where I sat on a couch and watched it all in one fell swoop. 

AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

James Nesbitt returns for his third or fourth – or tenth – pairing up with Coben as Simon Greene, a successful businessman with a “normal” family. But wait! Here’s where things change up a little – because Simon’s family is inabnormal mode from the start. His oldest daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange) should be finishing her second year of college, but she ended up finding a vile boyfriend who got her hooked on heroin, and now she has now been missing for the past six months. Still, Simon tries to live a “normal” life with his pediatrician wife (Minnie Driver, soooooooooo wasted here), his moody son, who has gone off to Uni to brood, and his younger daughter, who is sometimes in a wheelchair and sometimes not, with no explanation. 

But then Simon receives a text that Paige is busking in a local park. Secretly (because if anybody was upfront with anyone else, there would be no story), Simon heads to the park where he meets Paige and begs her to come home, only to be confronted by the vile boyfriend. Simon then proceeds to stomp the V.B. to a pulp, and his perhaps justifiable rage is caught on phone cam and quickly reaches two million hits on Tik Tok. Thus, it comes as no surprise when the boyfriend is found brutally murdered and the police (a miscast Alfred Enoch and a fun Amy Gledhill as two cops with secrets of their own!!!) suspect Simon is the killer. 

As this is Harlan Coben, Simon could very well be the killer, and Nesbitt does a good job being so unlikable that I’d be just as happy if he were unmasked at the end. And though we spend much of the next seven hours following Simon as he tries to clear his name and find his daughter, the narrative is, in fact, divided pretty evenly into four perspectives. 

Easily my favorite concerns a private investigator named Elena Ravenscroft, played by Ruth Jones (Gavin and Stacey), who is easily the best thing in this series. She is actually working on a couple of unrelated cases which, of course, are anything but unrelated! An added bonus is that she is helped in her efforts by her tech support (and mother-in-law) Lou, who is played by Annette Badland. Ah Sweet Mystery fans may recall that Ms. B. joined me for a breakfast chat at the 2024 Agatha Christie Festival and remains my Best Friend Forever!!

The third perspective, is the aforementioned pair of cops who are, fortunately, too bright to stay on the wrong path for long. But as a Harlan Coben thriller has about 1,724 paths to follow, this pair keeps trim. And the fourth and final perspective deals with a young couple named Ash and Dee Dee, who grew up together in difficult circumstances and have finally settled on a career . . . as contract killers. What does this have to do with anything?? In Coben Land, you just sit back and watch the killing go on and on, knowing that by episode six or seven, a connection to all the other mishegoss will be made. 

Sure enough, Dee Dee has a secret, and once that’s revealed, the four narrative strands of Run Away begin to run together – and here is where the series runs off the rails for me, becoming both too much and not enough. By the final episode, about forty out of the fifty-five characters have died violently. Sadly, only one of these deaths truly upset me, while most of them delighted me, especially the one caused by the great Geraldine James (The Jewel in the Crown) as a really loopy nun! With all the twisty paths strewn with corpses, now comes the Coben Climax, where Run Away proceeds with something like six false endings before getting to the final final final twist, where all is revealed, after which I have to push the cats off my lap and go take a long, hot shower. 

Is Run Away ridiculous. Oh, yes. Is it entertaining? Well . . . yes. Did Minnie Driver spend most of the series doing literally nothing? Dammit – yes! Do I feel cheated for having watched it when I could have been out in the rain returning all the Christmas presents that don’t fit? I do – and I hereby announce that I wash my hands of Harlan Coben adaptations forever!!!

But wait! Netflix has announced that another Coben adaptation will be out this year. And I Will Find You is the first all- American production of the series. And it stars Rosalind Eleazar (a British actress, doing a better American accent than you or I ever could) who plays Louisa in Slow Horses on Apple TV, which is the show I should be talking about here as it is brilliant! 

So, regretfully, I will probably be catching I Will Find You when it turns up later this year. As for all of you, watch Slow Horses. Watch Down Cemetery Road. Watch the new seasons of The Traitors (the latest one from the U.K. is the best yet, and Alan Cumming returns tomorrow with the U.S. series.)

As for Run Away, your best bet is to . . . . well, it’s right there in the title.