They come round sooner every time, do they not? I think we’re now the recipients of a new Harlan Coben adaptation every three weeks or so. Who knows what rate will be attained next year? We watch and wait, though possibly in neither case for long.
We are now about a dozen, rating-banking offerings into the bestselling thriller writer’s multi-book deals with Netflix and Amazon. They are generally solid, workmanlike fare that doubtless help fund many passion projects and pay many mortgages along the way. They are comfort TV not just for viewers, but, I suspect, everyone involved.
Run Away (written by frequent Coben collaborator Danny Brocklehurst, plus Tom Farrelly and Amanda Duke, and based on the 2019 book of the same name, and one of Coben’s less bombastic and more harrowing thrillers) is a return to form. Not least because it stars James Nesbitt as Simon, the tormented father of Paige, who is now in the throes of drug addiction and missing from home. It’s not a groundbreaking role for Nesbitt but it does remind you that few do the tormented Everyman better than he does. And, just as deeply pleasingly, it has the always-magnificent Tracy-Ann Oberman going toe to toe with him as his terrifying lawyer Jessica, plus Ruth Jones as private investigator Elena Ravenscroft, an iron fist in a velvet glove – faintly but beautifully unsettling in every scene.
The plot moves in increasingly convoluted but well-oiled grooves towards its resolution over the course of eight episodes. Despite the misgivings of his wife, Ingrid (an underused Minnie Driver, soon to be comatose in an ICU bed while hospital dialogue so hackneyed it would disgrace Casualty plays out above her), who worries that the official advice is that they must let their daughter Paige reach rock bottom before she can be helped, Simon is still secretly searching for his missing daughter.
He receives a tipoff that she is busking in a local park, but just as he approaches her he is confronted by her boyfriend/dealer Aaron (an impressively-immediately loathsome figure, played by Thomas Flynn) and she – see title – runs away. Aaron and Simon get into a fight as Simon tries to give chase and an edited clip that appears to show the latter savagely beating an innocent homeless man soon goes viral. Which, when Aaron is discovered stabbed to death soon thereafter, puts Simon in the frame for his murder. Things become even more complicated when he and Ingrid sneak into the crime scene, meet the kindly Cornelius (Lucian Msamati), who used to keep an eye on Paige and offer her occasional refuge when Aaron hit her, and become embroiled in a basement shootout when he takes them to meet Aaron’s supplier who might know more about their daughter’s fate.
Meanwhile – because there is always a meanwhile, and usually two – Elena is being hired by a very rich man called Sebastian Thorpe to search for his missing adoptive son Henry, whose disappearance the police are refusing to take seriously. “Adoptive” is a Chekhov’s gun of a word in these circumstances, but Elena alas doesn’t know that she is in a quarterly mystery series on Netflix and so does not pick up on this immediately. Perhaps she is distracted by the surveillance she is doing for as-yet-unexplained reasons on the owner of a vegan restaurant.
Second meanwhile: a murderous young duo are out, well, murdering people. Apparently unconnected, but clearly on the instructions of a third party who needs them out of the way. “Make it different,” the girl (a mesmeric Maeve Courtier-Lilley) reminds the boy as he leaves the car to execute their latest prey.
Each episode ends with a twist and at least a few new avenues of intrigue for viewers to trot down towards the next instalment. The end of the first, for example, shows us Paige’s brother at university with the guitar we saw her using to busk stashed in his room, and Elena discovering that the last post on Henry’s Instagram before he allegedly went off on a two-week holiday was from Paige. Dum-dum-dah! Tune in next week, as they used to say before digital streaming unshackled us from time and space. And we will, for Coben. We do. Rating-bankers all.
