I have recently joined a new book club at work, each month someone gets to pick the book we read and the February book was Run Away by Harlan Coben. Not my usual type of book, but I gave it a go!
Run Away, Harlan Coben
Themes: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Adult
Reading Format: Paperback
3.5 STARS
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I feel like to really get into how I felt about this book I need to break this review down into two sections, the story/plot and the writing. Because one contributed to this being a higher star rating and the other stopped it from being too high. Shall we start on the positives?
The plot of this book followed a dad trying to find his daughter who he lost to drugs and an abusive man. There have been a series of murders that are somehow involved in his search and he must try and figure out how everything is connected. There was a lot of suspense in this book, mainly thanks to the use of guns. This combined with short chapters made it quite easy to binge read and so I read it over one weekend.
The characters I didn’t really care much for and found they slowly grew on me. But mainly I just wanted to know how each line of the story was relevant to the overall plot. Gradually I could see the plot breaking off into separate story arcs and I felt compelled to keep reading to see where this went. So yes, I enjoyed the story of this book and I wanted to pick it up.
But. A big but. I was shocked by the writing. This book was blurbed by Dan Brown, the writer has previously had a book adapted to a Netflix series. So I expected his writing to at least be decent. I understand that when writing a mystery you need to make it easy to follow otherwise you lose half of your readers, but there’s simplifying the writing and then there’s using nativities that could have easily been avoided.
The author’s use of description could have certainly used some work. Most women were initially described in some sexy way. I have no issue with looks being described first as that is usually how we make first impressions fact to face. But the full lips, luscious hair, the sexy undertones of the descriptions we saw in most ‘eligible’ women in this book made me feel quite irritated. This book even mentions itself when one of the characters is being sexist by saying a woman needed a man to save her. So the author is clearly aware of this being an issue, yet the male gaze we look through pins these women to nothing more than their womanly, sexy appearance to start with.
Further on from this, the naivety and ignorance towards LGBT themes mentioned in this book have shocked me. At one point our main character reports to be fascinated, fascinated, but the fact that two identical twins with the same upbringing may have different sexual preferences. Heaven forbid! The little comments like this did begin to ruin the reading experience of Run Away for me, but I’m glad I pushed through to finish this book as I was intrigued by what was happening. It’s just a shame this was twinged with naive writing and failed at its attempts to be inclusive.
It’s a shame that the writing was the weak point in this book, but at least the plot kept you reading. The story itself does sound interesting. Perhaps I will check this one out at some point to see how I feel about it.