Review: The Runaway Man

Men alone.

The Runaway Man

by Kelly Tantau

Mystery

This is a tense, character‑driven crime novel about a man who vanishes and the policeman determined to find him.

Nick Greene deliberately disappears from his old life, seeking quiet in his town’s rugged forest park. His fragile anonymity shatters when a curious fisherman stumbles upon him, triggering an accident that transforms a simple missing‑persons report into a manhunt.

Nick flees to the neighbouring city of Abercrombie, hiding out in a rundown motel that shelters people living on society’s margins. The scenes there have an Edward Hopper stillness – lonely store fronts, muted colours, and a David Lynch‑like sense of dislocation. Nick forms an uneasy bond with Marina, an almost love interest, whose past is as knotted as his own. Detective Sergeant Frank O’Leary, the man hunting Nick, also has a knotted past. He’s haunted by guilt from an earlier, botched case, and is desperate for redemption.

Tantau’s prose is vivid and atmospheric, rich with Southern Hemisphere flora and fauna. The shifting landscapes – bush, rural backwater, city – echo Nick’s internal turmoil. Bush scenes carry the existential isolation of John Mulgan’s Man Alone.

This is a story of disappearance, reinvention, introspection, and guilt. Nick isn’t always likeable, but he’s painfully human, and the detective’s pursuit adds emotional weight. A twist ending seals the novel’s quiet, unsettling power.

^{Cranthorpe Millner Publishers}

^{Published: 2023}