Harlan Coben’s Run Away (2019) is a standalone domestic thriller from the internationally best-selling author. A #1 New York Times bestseller, the novel follows Simon Greene, an affluent New York City financial advisor whose carefully constructed life is shattered after searching for his estranged daughter, Paige, who is unhoused and has a drug addiction. Simon’s desperate attempt to bring her home results in a violent confrontation with her abusive boyfriend in Central Park. The incident is captured on video and goes viral, branding him a public villain. Simon’s search for Paige soon plunges him into a dangerous criminal conspiracy that threatens to destroy what remains of his family. The novel explores The False Security of Wealth and Status, The Instinctive Nature of Protecting Family, and The Corrosive Nature of Secrets. Coben is an acclaimed author of dozens of suburban thrillers, including Tell No One, Fool Me Once, and the Edgar Award-winning Myron Bolitar series (the first book of which is Deal Breaker). Many of his standalone thrillers have been adapted for television as part of a major partnership with Netflix.

This guide refers to the 2020 Grand Central Publishing mass-market edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, death by suicide, graphic violence, sexual violence, rape, physical abuse, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, addiction, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Simon Greene, a wealthy financial advisor, is haunted by the disappearance of his daughter Paige Greene, who has fallen into drug addiction. Against the wishes of his wife, Ingrid Greene, a pediatrician, Simon secretly searches for her. Following a tip from an informant named Dave, he finds Paige busking in Central Park, emaciated and barely recognizable. When he confronts her, she seems momentarily lucid, but the arrival of her abusive boyfriend, Aaron Corval, causes her to flee. Enraged, Simon punches Aaron, an act caught on video by tourists that quickly goes viral, painting Simon as a violent plutocrat attacking an unhoused person. He’s arrested, but the charges are later dropped when Aaron vanishes. 

Three months pass, and Simon’s life achieves a tense normalcy until New York Police Department (NYPD) Detective Isaac Fagbenle arrives at his office. Fagbenle reveals that Aaron has been brutally murdered in a Bronx tenement, making Simon and Paige prime suspects. Determined to find Paige before the police do, Simon and Ingrid go to the crime scene. There, they meet a neighbor, Cornelius, who tells them that he saw Paige bruised and fleeing the apartment two days before the murder, likely after a beating from Aaron. Cornelius directs them to a local drug dealer named Rocco, who may know Paige’s whereabouts. In the basement of an abandoned building, Simon and Ingrid offer Rocco money for information, but their meeting is violently interrupted when a young man named Luther Ritz storms in and shoots Ingrid. As Simon shields Ingrid from further injury, Cornelius enters the basement and incapacitates Luther with a single shot.

Ingrid is rushed to the hospital and remains in a coma. Upon returning to the Bronx crime scene, Simon encounters Elena Ramirez, a private investigator from Chicago, Illinois, who’s searching for a missing young man named Henry Thorpe. Elena reveals that Henry was in contact with Paige or Aaron right before he vanished. 

The investigation expands as Simon learns from Paige’s college roommate, Eileen Vaughan, that Paige became withdrawn after an alleged sexual assault by a student named Doug Mulzer. She also notes that Paige was fixated on a Family Tree Club. Paige’s genetics professor, Louis van de Beek, adds that shortly after the assault, Doug himself was viciously beaten with a baseball bat. Van de Beek saw Paige with Aaron immediately afterward, implying that Aaron was the vigilante. Meanwhile, Elena uncovers a link between Henry, Aaron, a murdered New Jersey tattoo artist named Damien Gorse, and a man named Kevin Gano, who was found dead by apparent suicide at his home in Boston, Massachusetts. All four were adopted from a small agency in Maine called Hope Faith and recently discovered that they were half-brothers via a DNA ancestry website.

A parallel narrative follows two assassins, a man named Ash and a young woman named Dee Dee, as they systematically murder a list of men, including Damien and Kevin. Dee Dee is a member of a cult called “the Shining Truth,” and they’re acting on orders from its leaders: the dying founder, Casper Vartage, and his two sons. Decades ago, Vartage sold his other infant sons into illegal adoptions to ensure that only his two chosen heirs would inherit his multimillion-dollar empire. Now that the estranged sons have found each other through DNA testing, the heirs have hired Ash and Dee Dee to eliminate them all. 

Elena tracks the adoptions to Alison Mayflower, a former case worker. Dee Dee, posing as Alison’s partner, Stephanie Mars, lures Elena to a secluded cabin, where Ash murders her. After finding Simon’s texts on Elena’s phone, they realize that he’s closing in on their conspiracy and decide that he must be their next target. Back in New York, doubts about his family’s secrets lead Simon to secretly run a paternity test, which confirms that he’s the biological father of his three children.

At Cornelius’s apartment, Simon gives Rocco money in exchange for information about Paige. Ash and Dee Dee, having traced Simon’s location, burst into the apartment, killing Rocco and Luther. Simon pushes Cornelius through a window onto the fire escape to save him, taking two bullets in the back. As he falls, Cornelius shoots at Ash, killing him.

As Dee Dee aims to execute Simon, a mysterious older woman enters the apartment. After pushing Dee Dee from the window to her death, the woman, Mother Adiona, explains that she’s a member of the Shining Truth and the secret mother of one of the adopted sons. Upon discovering the plot to murder the adopted boys, she intervened to save the remaining sons and, by extension, Simon. With the killers dead and the cult leaders protected by lawyers, the case stalls, and Paige remains missing.

A month later, Simon, now recovering from his wounds, returns late one night to Ingrid’s hospital room to find Paige sitting at her mother’s bedside. She reveals that after witnessing Aaron’s murder, she fled to a rehabilitation facility in Buffalo, New York. 

On the long drive back to the rehab facility, Simon pieces together the final truths. Paige claims that she killed Aaron, but Simon deduces that his daughter is covering for Ingrid, who’s the real killer. After Paige called her, beaten and desperate, Ingrid went to the Bronx during a break from her shift and murdered Aaron to save her daughter, making it look like a gang killing. Luther shot Ingrid because he witnessed her at the murder scene. Ash and Dee Dee arrived at the apartment later to kill Aaron, only to find him already dead. Simon also tells Paige that he has worked out the nature of her connection to Aaron. He reveals that he visited Doug Mulzer, who told him that during the vengeful beating, Aaron screamed, “No one hurts my sister” (399). Consequently, he realized that Paige and Aaron were half-siblings through a shared mother. Years before meeting Simon, a teenage Ingrid had been drawn into the Shining Truth, where she was impregnated by its leader, Casper Vartage. The cult leaders told her that the baby was stillborn, a trauma that led her to flee and eventually be deprogrammed at the same retreat where she would later take Paige. Paige confirms that she took a DNA test revealing that Aaron was her half-brother, which led to an unhealthy, codependent relationship in which he controlled her and got her addicted to drugs.

Months later, Simon’s life has taken on a fragile happiness. Ingrid has recovered from her injuries, and Paige is home and enrolled in college. During a walk, Ingrid confesses to Simon that she killed Aaron. Simon, in turn, makes the agonizing decision to protect his wife from the knowledge that she unknowingly murdered her own long-lost son.