Nine signs you’re trapped in a Harlan Coben mystery

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 on New Year’s Day. 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. 

These are just some of the delusions that you have to embrace while watching – consider it a bingo card or, if you’re really brave, a drinking game…

Your humble salary somehow pays the mortgage on a massive home

The sums just don’t add up. Our protagonist has worked a solid but not exactly lucrative job for years, as a teacher or a doctor or a mid-ranking police officer, and yet their house would cause Kevin McCloud to stop and gawp. Flooded with light, surrounded by vast grounds and fitted out like a spread from House & Garden, it’s a residence more befitting a premiership footballer than a member of the middle class. Oh, and they cruise around in a massive four-wheel drive too. No wonder there are whispers that someone has been embezzling money from the local kids’ sports club. The biggest tell that you’re stuck in the Coben-verse is when income doesn’t correlate to standard of living. In Missing You, one character appears to somehow be living it up in a gorgeous coastal retreat on the proceeds of… a Substack newsletter. 

Richard Armitage is looking troubled 

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Who’s that man brooding in the corner, narrowing his eyes and looking like he’s weighed down by a lifetime of secrets that are about to bubble up to the surface? All hail the one true king of the HCTU, Mr Richard Armitage. The actor, erstwhile of the Hobbit film franchise and that sweeping BBC adaptation of North & South, has now appeared in four, yes four, consecutive Cobens. If Coben (or at least, the producer of his TV shows) is Scorsese, then Armitage is his De Niro, the star around which all the others orbit. Whether he’s playing a dead husband or a living one, a thwarted photographer or a police boss, you can safely assume that he is embroiled in some pretty weird and/or dodgy goings on, whether he has realised it yet or not.

Your significant other has vanished into thin air 

Thought you were happily married/engaged to/cohabitating with the love of your life? Think again (doesn’t “think again” sound like it could be the title of Netflix’s next Harlan Coben adaptation?). If you’re a Coben character, there’s a very high probability that your beloved has disappeared without warning, fading into the ether, just like Kat’s fiancé Josh does in Missing You. Or like Adam (Richard Armitage)’s runaway wife Corinne in The Stranger. Will they ever be seen (alive) again? It all depends on the handful of clues that they’ve left in their wake.

Everything that’s going wrong in your life is linked to a mystery from decades ago

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Remember that bad thing that you tried to block out of your mind for years? Like when your childhood best friend disappeared in a game of hide and seek gone wrong, or when your dad was killed in the line of duty. Or perhaps that dead body you happened to dispose of under shady circumstances. Well, you’d better believe that this poorly concealed trauma is coming back to haunt you with a vengeance – in fact, literally all of your current woes can probably be traced back to that very moment, in ways that range from the straightforward to the unfeasibly circuitous.

Your name sounds a bit weird when delivered in a northern accent 

So our protagonist allegedly grew up in the UK – Greater Manchester or the Liverpool City region, judging by the landmarks that keep cropping up – at some point during the late 20th century. Why, then, does their name sound like it would better suit a Gilded Age tycoon or an American football player? Or like they’ve created a new identity by playing the game where you match the name of your first pet with the road you grew up on, or with your grandmother’s maiden name? In Missing You, Richard Armitage plays a police officer called Ellis Stagger, Marc Warren has the rather glamorous moniker of Monte Leburne and Steve Pemberton is Titus Monroe – all three names have more than a touch of the “random generator” about them. My personal favourite example from the HCTU? Lancastrian actor Lee Ingleby, in the 2016 Coben series The Five, taking on the role of a man named Slade.

You’re constantly travelling back and forth over the Runcorn-Widnes bridge

Not an episode seems to go by without Coben’s characters taking a jaunt on the Silver Jubilee Bridge, more commonly known as the Runcorn-Widnes Bridge, an iconic landmark of the northwest. Rarely has a feat of structural engineering received as much screen time as in Stay Close, where it is used to signify part of the main character Megan (Cush Jumbo)’s journey from her snazzy new life back to the scene of her grotty old one (you could argue that, yes, if she’d really wanted to escape the secrets of her past, she probably should have moved a bit further afield than to the other end of the massive bridge). Her toll expenditure must have been ruinous.

Your hair looks great despite your severe emotional distress 

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Most people find that when their life falls apart, they don’t exactly look their best. Personal grooming tends to go out of the window when you’re grappling with the demons of the past. Not here, though. Emotional turmoil looks great on Coben’s characters, the proud custodians of some of the shiniest hair on TV. Think of Michelle Keegan’s impossibly glossy mane in Fool Me Once, or Hannah John-Kamen’s lovely balayage highlights in The Stranger, which were hidden under a baseball cap while she was busy ambushing local residents and sharing devastating truths. Maybe they’re born with it, maybe they’re somehow managing to squeeze a weekly blow-dry in among a packed schedule of tailing potential suspects, breaking and entering, and dodging Richard Armitage. 

Your best mates are all in suspiciously useful professions

There are very few B2B sales executives or branding experts in the Coben-verse. Generic middle management jobs don’t really seem to exist. Instead, almost everyone in the social circle has a clearly delineated practical expertise that just so happens to be very useful indeed when you’re attempting to find the aforementioned missing partner or uncover a dark conspiracy. In Missing You, for example, it’s not enough for protagonist Kat to be a detective inspector in the local police force. She’s also best friends with a private detective, Jessica Plummer’s Stacey, who can hunt down vital information through various unofficial, potentially unethical channels. And in Fool Me Once, Maya (Michelle Keegan) is close pals with one of her old army colleagues, who happens to have easy access to various military records and weaponry.

A random assortment of British celebrities keep wandering into your life 

Wait, is that Matt from Busted sitting in that bar? Doesn’t the woman in that grainy CCTV footage look a lot like… TV chef and actor Lisa Faulkner? How is podcast host GK Barry tangled up in all of this? In Harlan-land (Harland?), navigating everyday life can start to feel a bit like wandering through the green room of ITV’s This Morning, being greeted by slightly niche British celebrities at every turn. All of this, of course, will be entirely lost on any international viewers. We can only imagine who’s next on the casting hit list. Alison Hammond? Peter Andre? The two blokes from The Rest is History? Stranger things have happened. 

‘Missing You’ is on Netflix now