The Five: May Be The Best

So my wife and I binged Harlan Coben's The Five the past few nights on Netflix.  It's a 10-episode series by way of Sky One in the U.K. from 2016, and somehow we missed it.  Better late than never - a lot better - because The Five may be the best of the four Coben narratives we've now seen on the screen.

I'm not such an expert in the mystery genre that I can tell you how many of the tropes The Five rolls out were seen in that series for the first time.  I can tell you they were done really well.  This ranges from teenagers in the forest with a younger kid who gets lost and was he killed or kidnapped - this has been done now so many times you can pin up a list of TV and cinematic mysteries, throw a dart at it, and you're likely to hit one - to the old cop, well into senility, whose memory may hold the key to the whole mystery (acted so well in the latest season of True Detective by Mahershala Ali).

And The Five has all sorts of other cool Coben hallmarks, including mysteries neatly solved at the end (a suspect vanishes after going into a building with no other egress, moments before the cops arrive) to self-contained brilliant little vignettes (an investigator breaks into a house, finds a kettle boiling, turns it off - but the owner soon returns to turn it off himself, and finds it not whistling, but the investigator still gets away with it).  

But the heart and soul of the story is what the vanishing of the little boy does to the four teenagers, who are adults for most of the series.  Further, one is the little boy's older brother, another is now a police detective, and there's another guy and a girl/woman in the group, and lots of love as well as tension in the air.  Add to this a murderous pedophile - another Coben speciality - who takes credit for the disappearance of the little boy, and you have a series which is so riveting that you'll wish there was a second season, even though there couldn't be.