Run Away is a quintessential Harlan Coben thriller, but even by those standards it’s impressively dense and demented.

There are many good performances, but I was especially fond of Jones (co-creator and co-star, with James Corden, of the much-loved “Gavin & Stacey”), whose no-nonsense shamus could support a show of her own, and Gledhill, as the only character allowed to display any sort of cheeriness — a necessary leavening agent over eight dark episodes.

Run Away is another solid Coben thriller with good performances, a little bit of humor and lots of twists. Will it be memorable five seconds after you finish watching it? Probably not. But it’s something good to binge over a weekend.

It's kind of bonkers and likely to engage viewers, but one can't help but be left wanting a little more.

here are lazy shortcuts to characterisation, with several players reduced to little more than narrative cogs. But as disposable entertainment goes, Run Away is effective hokum. And sometimes, particularly on New Year’s Day, that’s precisely what the patient requires.

For those still nursing holiday hangovers, the hull may hold through the eight episodes of this admittedly never-boring thriller. Others may find themselves hoping that next year’s Coben anchors itself just a bit more slightly to things like logic and reality.

For all its twists, turns, red herrings and fishy dialogue, Run Away (Netflix) gives the viewer exactly what it expects. We came here to binge, not watch. It’s the TV drama equivalent of mindlessly scrolling your phone.