I was looking at the books in Costco when I happened upon this one and decided to take a peek at it. It had a rather gripping writing style, so I started reading it and was able to finish it in one afternoon/evening -- over the span of maybe 4-ish hours of reading time. It was a pretty zippy read.
The premise of Run Away is that a man's daughter has gone missing and he wants to find her. She happens to be a drug addict. There are lots of twisty plot twists in this novel, which keep the suspense dialed up. I found them to be well-placed and not too unbelievable.
It was set very contemporarily; lots of instances of particularly modern technology and culture/issues. Stuff that people living 2019 would be familiar with. That was interesting, as I don't think I've really read any other books (recently, at least) that have been set in a time period so up-to-the-moment.
It had hints of Prisoners, the Millenium trilogy and Netflix's show Ozark, even. Prisoners for the family/mystery of child's disappearance element, Ozark for the happy/somewhat wealthy [ie definitely upper middle class, if not more] family disrupted by unfortunate events/getting involved with something shady, and Millenium trilogy because of the mystery/thriller genre.
It reminded me of Millenium,** but flashier (more dramatic, I suppose, and the writing style itself as well), if you will. Millenium was more of a slow burn and more measured in style (although still quite good!). Stieg Larsson's writing style had more of a focus on various background context information and minute details. The writing style also had a bit more of a terse tone.*
If you like twisty suspenseful stuff with a dose of murder and mystery that involves particularly contemporary issues in its plot, this would probably be an enjoyable read. It's not high literature, but it's probably at least a step or so above romance novels...
At the end, there was a short acknowledgment section where the author thanked a series of people for donating to charities, and in return he used their names for characters in the book. I found that somewhat interesting, since I don't think I've read any acknowledgments that mention something like that before. I personally could not write a fictional book and use the names of people I actually know or even know of. I'd think too much about the actual person with the name I used for a character while writing the book. I would need characters to be as blank of slates as possible, so they can't have names that I already have strong impressions/associations of because they're names of people I know (of). I also wouldn't use names of people I actually know personally, unless I was purposefully including/writing a (probably relatively minor) character based on them.
There was a particular plot element that led me to wonder about a theoretical scenario, which I don't want to reveal too casually here. Spoilers to follow: //If you had a kid, yet never saw the kid grow up (and therefore did not know what exactly they looked like), would you be able to recognize them if you happened to randomly see them in public somewhere when they were grown? Suppose you know who the other parent is and what they (in this case, father, but I suppose it could go the other way too) looked like as well. Generally speaking, people tend to have a decently strong familial resemblance to others they're biologically related to. Look at the Kennedy family or really most other families out there. Siblings tend to resemble each other and children tend to resemble their parents at least to some degree. Therefore, I'd think that someone might possibly be able to recognize a theoretical long lost child, but who knows... I tried looking up about this kind of thing, but didn't quite find what I had hoped. In any case, it's certainly an interesting thing to ponder.***
**digression/tangent: I've read a few other mystery/thriller/crime novels by Scandinavian authors in hopes I'd find one on par with Stieg Larsson's work, but I never really did. Not that the ones I read were horribly bad, they just weren't Millenium trilogy levels of spectacular.
***additional tangent: I also have wondered in the past about how common it is for someone to move back into a home they lived in previously. Not in the sense of moving back in with one's parents, but living in a given home, moving somewhere else, then eventually ending up moving back to the original home after it's had a period of having different residents than the original person mentioned initially. I looked up about this before and did manage to find one case where a family had regretted selling their home, and then was able to buy it back and move back into it maybe a year (not terribly long) after they had initially sold it. [further tangent: there's a line in Smile Like You Mean It that's vaguely related to this concept]
*I had to go look up the difference between tone and voice. Voice is more akin to a given person's idiolect -- phrases or quirks of their writing or speech. Words they tend to use or don't use. Their pattern(s) of writing or speech, basically. Voice can vary depending on the context -- I have a particular voice I write this blog in, yet I have a different, more buttoned-up voice if I'm writing a News Article.
Tone is more of something like... angry. Or happy. Lighthearted. Sarcastic. Sad. Enthusiastic. Appreciative. Formal. And so on. It has more to do with how writing/speech comes across to others.
Further reading from Grammarly's blog: Tone vs. Voice and more specifically on Tone
author's note: although I'm aware that AP Style instructs that titles of compositions are in quotation marks, I didn't feel like using those conventions here.
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