Nine signs you're trapped in a Harlan Coben mystery

Adaptations like Missing You’ are a perfect hangover watch, but they definitely require viewers to suspend their disbelief. Katie Rosseinsky unravels some of their most baffling cliches

-  Katie Rosseinsky

Jump in the 4x4, let Richard Armitage ride shotgun and suspend your disbelief, because it's time to return to the Harlan Coben Television Universe (HCTU). Don't tell me you have missed it.

Netflix has been churning out dramas based on the oeuvre of New Jersey-based mystery writer Coben since 2018, which scratch the itch you didn’t know you had for soapy thrillers featuring a bunch of British actors hamming it up. On 1 January last year, the streamer released Fool Me Once, a chaotic, cliffhanger-laden tale that starred Michelle Keegan wearing an array of very nice coats – which then went on to become Netflix’s most watched series of 2024 (in spite of some decidedly patchy reviews).

Since then, some benevolent genius has clearly realised that the labyrinthine plots and glossy settings of Coben’s work conspire to make excellent hangover viewing, and decided to drop yet another adaptation today. It’s as close as Netflix gets to public service broadcasting.

Missing You is the story of Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar), a police officer who is dealing with the fallout from her father’s murder and her boyfriend pulling a disappearing act a few years back when she’s called upon to solve another missing person case. Is it slightly unhinged? Yes. Will it make you gasp out loud? Sure (whether you’re gasping at the audacity at some of the twists, or at the clunkiness of some of the exposition is your call). And, most importantly, does it feature a whole load of the tropes, clichés and inexplicable dramatic choices that we’ve come to expect from the HCTU? Absolutely.

In fact, after a while, getting stuck into a Coben series can feel a bit like falling into an uncanny parallel universe, one where the normal rules of feasibility don’t apply and where everyone has implausibly well-coiffed hair.