We enter 2026 with twelve full months ahead to explore major releases and long-awaited returns. For the most part, streaming platforms tend to hold their biggest bets until mid-January. Netflix, however, moves first, opening the year with a new limited series adapted from a novel by Harlan Coben: Run Away — released in Brazil as Custe o Que Custar.

Whenever I talk about series born from Coben’s books — or directly from his imagination — I end up repeating the same idea: at heart, they are modern soap operas disguised as thrillers. Family dramas pushed to the edge, built on constant twists, carefully buried secrets, and that persistent feeling that no one — absolutely no one — is telling the whole truth. Run Away does not break this rule. On the contrary, it confirms it with almost comforting confidence.

The story begins with a universal, nearly primal fear: the disappearance of a child. Simon Greene, played by James Nesbitt, had a life that seemed to work — a stable marriage, a solid career, children raised with care. Everything collapses when his eldest daughter, Paige, becomes involved with drugs, drifts away from her family, and vanishes. When Simon finally finds her busking in a city park, the instinct to bring her home ends in violence, confusion, and public humiliation. An edited video spreads online, the narrative twists, and shortly afterward, Paige’s boyfriend is found dead. The desperate father becomes a suspect. What began as an intimate search turns into a moral, emotional, and police labyrinth.

This is where Coben feels most at home: ordinary families thrust into extreme situations, where every decision exposes an old fracture. Run Away does not attempt to reinvent the genre. It bets on accumulation: more characters, more parallel storylines, more “meanwhiles,” more secrets surfacing at the worst possible moment. Each episode delivers a new clue, a displaced piece of information, a detail that shifts the meaning of everything that came before. It is deliberate, almost mechanical, and precisely for that reason, highly effective for binge-watching, especially if you already know that Coben never protects his characters when a full-blown twist is available.

The series is a direct adaptation of the novel published in 2019. The book throws everything into the blender: betrayals, addiction, religious cults, DNA genealogy websites, revenge, and reconciliation. Within Coben’s body of work, it was already seen as less flashy and more painful, less interested in clever tricks and more focused on emotional impact. Its themes — addiction, parental guilt, and the devastating idea that love is not always enough to save someone — resonate uncomfortably close to reality. They echo recent and tragic real-world cases, such as the deaths of Rob and Michelle Reiner, whose son Nick is a drug addict and possibly their killer, or the public unraveling of the NXIVM cult through documentaries like The Vow. Even the widespread use of DNA genealogy sites feeds into this sense of proximity. All of it feels disturbingly familiar, even as the plot veers into unimaginable turns.

Netflix’s version preserves the book’s core but expands secondary characters, introduces new parallel arcs, and relocates the story to the UK, adjusting the tone to British restraint and dry humor.

None of this is accidental. Run Away exists because there is a carefully engineered deal behind it. In 2018, Harlan Coben signed an exclusive agreement with Netflix to adapt 14 of his books, becoming executive producer on all of them. In 2022, the deal was renewed and expanded, including productions outside the American market. In practice, Coben became an internal seal of approval for the platform: closed stories, controlled costs, high engagement, and an audience that, after watching one, usually moves straight to the next. These are not series designed as “events,” but as habits. Reliable television.

The cast of Run Away reinforces that logic. James Nesbitt does what he does best: the ordinary man consumed by rage, desperation, and impulsive choices. Alongside him, Minnie Driver plays Ingrid, the mother trying to hold the family together as everything implodes, an important role, though curiously underused, a strange luxury when you have an actress of her caliber. The real standout is Ruth Jones as Elena Ravenscroft, a private investigator who is restrained, unpredictable, and always suggests that more is happening beneath the surface than the script openly states. And it is impossible not to praise Tracy Ann Oberman as the lawyer Jessica, who injects energy, irony, and a delicious dose of excess into every scene.

Around them, the series populates its world with characters who are never disposable: the ambiguous protector played by Lucian Msamati, detectives locked in constant tension portrayed by Alfred Enoch and Amy Gledhill, children who know more than they let on, and even a pair of roaming assassins who cut through the narrative as a reminder that, in Coben’s universe, violence is never far away.

In the end, Run Away is exactly what it promises to be. An engaging thriller full of sharp turns, consumed quickly, asking for no commitment beyond a few days. It may not linger in memory for long, but it fulfills its purpose. Especially if you enjoy a melodrama where not everything makes perfect sense. And in today’s streaming ecosystem, that is not insignificant. Sometimes, comfort is also a narrative choice, and Harlan Coben, more than anyone, understands its value.