Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Run Away by Harlan Coben

Run Away (Grand Central Publishing, 2019) is the most recent thriller from Harlan Coben, whose Myron Bolitar series was a fixture on the 1990s amateur sleuth lists. With the new century Coben has turned to elaborately plotted stand-alone thrillers; his latest has more twists and hairpin turns than two or three roller coasters combined.

Simon Greene, a successful financial manager in metropolitan New York City, does not know where he went wrong. His oldest daughter Paige seemed fine until she started college. There, she got in with the wrong crowd, started taking drugs, and disappeared. He’s never given up looking for her. His neighbor tells Simon he thinks he saw Paige in New York’s Central Park. Simon finds her but her boyfriend keeps him from taking her home. Paige disappears during the fracas that follows, and shortly thereafter the confrontation between Simon and the boyfriend, filmed by tourists in the park, goes viral on the internet, creating a legal and PR nightmare for Simon.   

Simon and his wife Ingrid start searching for Paige on their own, naively looking for her drug dealer in his lair in a confrontation that anyone should know wouldn’t go particularly well. Interwoven with this thread are descriptions of the activities of a pair of paid assassins that go to great lengths to ensure each kill cannot be linked to any of the others. They are being tracked by a determined private investigator named Elena Ramirez, who is trying to figure out what the pattern is in their choice of targets to protect potential future victims. Eventually both story lines merge but it takes awhile.

After a comparatively slow start that sets the stage for the story, the action never stops, galloping headlong until the very last paragraph. There are some great secondary characters, such as Cornelius, the owner of the apartment house where Paige lived. Devoted fans of the Myron Bolitar series will catch the indirect reference to Bolitar’s friend Windsor Horne Lockwood III early in the book.

Starred review from Library Journal.

·         Hardcover: 384 pages

·         Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; First Edition (March 19, 2019)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1538748460

·         ISBN-13: 978-1538748466

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.