Missing You: Don't Miss This Top-Notch Coben

I binged the five episodes of Harlan Coben's Missing You, which just went up on Netflix today.  I've watched who knows how many Coben stories on the screen -- if you want an idea of how many, just search on his name on this blog -- and I gotta say, I think Missing You is one his very best.  I know I say that about Coben's stories in just about every review of one of Coben's works brought to the screen, but that's because it's true every time I say it.

[And no warning about spoilers ahead, because there won't be any ... ]

First, the stars in this series include Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses), Richard Armitage (MI5), and James Nesbitt (Bloodlands), you can't go wrong with that.  And every other part in the series is well-acted, too.

Next, the story takes place in the UK.   When it comes to police detective stories, you usually can't go wrong with that, either.

The plot is classic Coben -- the series is taken from Coben's 2014 novel of the same name, which takes place in New York, and I haven't read -- with love affairs (frustrated and otherwise), complex parent-child relationships, cops of all ages and both genders, a loathsome villain, cold-blooded killers and killers who don't want to be -- all wrapped up in a plot that's seems so complex as to defy resolution, and yet--

Well, as I said, I don't want to give anything away.   I will mention that the story on the screen, whatever it may have been in the novel, is very woke, and that's fine with me.  The relationships, apparent and revealed, all make sense, and provide an excellent nesting and motivation for the story.

Last but not least, one of the things I most enjoy about Brit movies and TV series is picking up a phrase or two, the slanger the better, that I didn't know before.  Missing You delivers on that score as well, with a phrase for a certain part of the anatomy that was new to me.  So hey, I'm happy to say I learned something watching this short series, as well as very much enjoying it, on this first day of 2025

The Innocent: One of Harlan Coben's Best

I've never seen a Harlan Coben movie or television series -- that is, a movie or TV series based on Coben's novels -- that I didn't really like.  And The Innocent -- more precisely, El inocente, a Spanish-language eight-episode short series based on Coben's novel The Innocent, on Netflix since the end of April -- is one of his very best.

The narrative is a tightly woven multiple-suspect murder, prostitution, true love story, with at least three protagonists: Mateo Vidal, now very happily married, but served four years in prison because he accidentally pushed a young man to his death in a fight when Mateo was younger; Olivia Costa, Mateo's loving wife, pregnant with his baby, having left her earlier life as a prostitute; and Lorena Ortiz, also with a complicated past, now a detective, fighting to do the right thing in a male-chauvinistic and in part corrupt police force.  The performances of  Mario Casas, Aura Garrido, and Alexandra Jiménez in these three roles were outstanding, as was the acting of everyone else in this series.

As is the case with all of Coben's stories, characters are hit by improbable events and do improbable things, but you're wise as a viewer to follow your instincts -- i.e., what you get from the subtleties of the people and their interactions, sometimes barely perceptible but always there -- because it all fits together and makes sense in the end.  That's the way Coben rolls.  Pushes you pretty far out, but with just enough platform to hang in there and follow the clues as they inexorably stack up.

[SPOILER AHEAD....]

The one reservation I had -- actually, my wife mentioned it first, and I agreed -- was with Jaime (the father of the young man that Mateo pushed and accidentally killed) as the villain, who set Mateo up for most of the near brushes with death he has in the series.  Jaime's motivation is one-hundred-percent clear and understandable.  But his expertise in what he repeatedly tried to do to Mateo, in different but related ways, was not apparent or developped in the narrative.   My wife said, "so this guy is a criminal genius?"  He is in fact, an MD -- a good way for him to find out that Mateo and Olivia are expecting a baby -- but where does he get his criminal savvy?  This could have been remedied by making Jaime some kind of forensic doctor, I'd say.  But, ok, one reservation in a sea of characters who worked together with precise plausibility is a small quibble.

So see The Innocent, and enjoy.

Lazarus: The Real Sense

I'm a big Harlan Coben fan -- I've given rave reviews here on this blog to 8 of Coben's streaming series since 2017 -- so of course I was going to watch his latest, Lazarus (on Amazon Prime Video) -- and I talked my wife into watching it, too.

Lazarus is somewhat different from Coben's other works.   Like them, it's a great whodunnit, that keeps you guessing until the very end about who has killed whom.  And the story is so intriguing, that I enjoyed it immensely, even though I half-guessed who one of the worst culprits was.   So, in what way was Lazarus different?

Well, the main character, Dr. Joel Lazarus (a psychiatrist, powerfully played by Sam Claflin, who was memorable is Season 5 of Peaky Blinders), sees dead people, aka ghosts.  Indeed, one of the other characters (Seth, a detective, well played by David Finn) references the signature line from The Sixth Sense, "I see dead people," as he ridicules Lazarus about his interactions with dead people.  This at the very least makes Lazarus an ideal narrative to be released around Halloween.

But -- and this is the closest I'll come to a spoiler -- Lazarus is not really seeing ghosts, he's interacting with these dead people in his head.   As we come to learn, Lazarus for a variety of reasons is himself a troubled person, and his character is also an emblem of physician heal thyself.

A real high point of the six-episode limited series is Bill Nighy playing another Lazarus -- Dr. Jonathan Lazarus, also a psychiatrist, Joel's father.   Nighy is someone who never disappoints in his acting, and he again comes through with a sterling performance.

As does Harlan Coben once again.  I consider him a 100% watch-on-sight creator of great streaming television, and I look forward to seeing his next venture.

See my reviews of other Harlan Coben streaming series: No Second Chance ... Safe ... The Stranger ... The Five ... The Innocent ... Shelter ... Fool Me Once ... Missing You

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.

Run Away: Run Towards

I'm a big fan of Harlan Coben's adaptations on the screen -- I've reviewed 10 of his series here since 2017 - and am happy to lead off the New Year (once again) with a review of his latest, Run Away, an 8-part series that went up on Netflix on New Year's Day.  I'd say this eleventh Coben series I'm reviewing is, once again, one of his best, because:

• Lead actor James Nesbitt puts in a standout performance.  I've been enjoying his work since Bloodlands, tied in my opinion with the superb Blue Lights (in which Nesbitt doesn't appear) as a tour de force story taking place in Northern Ireland.   Nesbitt expertly delivers the wide range of human emotion required in Run Away, and is especially effective with his blend of heartbreak and fury.
• Coben's specialty is packing in all sorts of major clues at the beginning, like people being killed for apparently no reason, then coming up with a plausible explanation in the final episode.
• Also lighting up Coben's narratives are at first seemingly incidental characters, whom you find yourself really caring about as you're drawn into their personalities and stories. Elena Ravenscroft (played by Ruth Jones), a private detective (formerly police), is such a memorable character.
• Speaking of police, it was great to see  Alfred Enoch (Raych in Foundation! and Dean Thomas in four Harry Potter movies) as the indefatigable DI Isaac Fagbenle.  His partner, redhead Ruby Todd (played by Amy Gledhill) was very good, too.

Now, as you may have noticed, I'm talking more about characters than story here, because I don't want to give anything away.  But, trust me,  you'll have butterflies in your stomach and tears in your eyes (of joy and sadness) when you see Run Away.

 

Harlan Coben's Shelter: Stranger Things Meets Hunters

Stranger Things meets Hunters: that's what came to mind after seeing the first three episodes of Harlan Coben's Shelter (that's its name) on Amazon Prime Video back on August 18th, and I felt the same after seeing the finale eighth episode of what I hope will be just first season last night.  By which I mean: the center of the story are a bunch of idiosyncratic highly intelligent high school kids (Stranger Things) but the larger picture is not some Duffer Bros horror story, but a group of all-too human slave traders descended in some way from the Nazis (Hunters).

Stranger Things starred mostly unknown or little known performers with the exception of Winona Ryder, Hunters was pretty much the same except it had the mega-star Al Pacino, and Harlan Corbin's Shelter was more like Stranger Things, with Tovah Feldshuh the biggest star.  My wife and I first saw her on Broadway in Yentl years ago, and it's always good to see her again.  The rest of the acting in Shelter was pretty good, too, with standout acting by Jaden Michael as Mickey, the hero of this otherwise ensemble story.

I'm not going to say anything specific about the plot, because there are narrative-upending developments in just about every episode.  But I will say that you won't be sure or likely right about any of the villains until close to the end, and not every character you've come to know survives, and the ending will make you unsure about even that.  I'll also say that just as Stranger Things exults in the 1980s, Shelter is very much in the present, with even a political awareness displayed by some of the characters, and that's very much Harlan Coben and very much welcome.

I'll also say that I wish all eight episodes had been put up all at once, as Amazon and Netflix used to do it. That's what created binging, which turned the TV series into a novel, where you could enjoy as many chapters as you wanted in one continuing experience, but that's become an increasingly endangered species, as the streamers want to maximize their continuing subscribers.

But now that all eight episodes of Harlan Coben's Shelter are up there, you can binge them in this our degraded media environment, which I highly recommend.

And I hope to see you back here when I review the second season, which I intend to do it there is one.

I Will Find You: Find It!

I probably say this about every Harlan Coben series I review here (11 and counting so far) that it's the best of all the adaptations of Harlan Coben novels I've had the pleasure to see (I haven't read any of them), but (a) it's true, and (b) I Will Find You, just up on Netflix, in its high-powered got-you-by-the-throat action and intricate moebius-strip complexity of the characters and their loyalties, is in a class of its own.

In fact, I don't recall ever seeing such a roster of characters with questionable loyalties to the man in prison for killing his son, except in some earlier Coben works, and those characters were far fewer in number.  As you'll know from seeing the trailer (and there'll be no other spoilers in this review other than what's in the trailer), David Burroughs (the father) didn't do it.  And when a current photo turns up in which his son Matthew is alive and well, I  Will Find You is off and running.  Everyone is suspect in one way or another for doing what really happened, just about every friend and relative and supporter has conflicting interests, and may or may not be part of why Burroughs landed in prison.  Even the villains may or may not be responsible for what happened to Burroughs.  The Boston police are riddled with bad guys -- nothing new about that -- and the FBI, with a father and daughter somehow working together, bring what we see in the excellent FBI series on CBS to a new level.

A story like this takes great acting, and I Will Find You has it.   I haven't seen much if any of Avatar, but I did see him in Titan, and Sam Worthington as David Burroughs does a fine job.   I have indeed seen and much enjoyed Britt Lower in Severance, and she's dynamite in this new series.   Jonathan Tucker, whom I first saw in The Black Donnellys and then in Debris, brings his usual intensity as Adam, one of the complex cops. Milo Ventimiglia, whom I first saw in Heroes, and Madeleine Stowe, whom I first saw in 12 Monkeys (the movie), play crucial roles.  Chi McBride, whom I first saw who knows how many years ago in I, Robot, and Logan Browning, whom I don't recall seeing before, were memorable as the father-and-daughter FBI team.  And it's interesting, at least to me, that everyone other than Browning have major science fiction roles in their past.  If there are any science fiction producers reading this, I'd recommend they cast Logan Browning for a major action role.  She's equally adept at leaping tall buildings and sassy conversation.

Today is Father's Day, and I'm looking forward to seeing my family.   I Will Find You was put up on Netflix just a few days ago.   In addition to its other virtues, the series makes a good testament to a father's unbending devotion to his son.

 

The Stranger: Tight As A Drum, Surprising Heroes and Villains

My wife and I binged The Stranger on Netflix, mostly last night, and last two of the eight episodes, today.  It's based on Harlan Coben's novel. and it's intricately plotted, with tight as a drum resolutions, just as you'd expect from a Coben work.  Indeed, even more.  Which makes it about the best detective mystery series we've seen on any kind of television in years, maybe ever.

All I'll tell you about the plot is that a husband (Adam Price) is told a secret about this wife, which, when he confronts her about it, leads to her disappearance.  That happens in the first episode.  The rest of the series shows us the husband in search of his wife.  The search leads to all kinds of stunning surprises about his family and neighbors, all of which, though seemingly beyond the most dogged detective work, tie together plausibly in the end.

That's no small feat in a genre in which far fewer twists and turns are left not fully explained.  And The Stranger does this with surprising villains and heroes at almost every turn, and moral ambiguities swirling around just about every scene.  In that sense, The Stranger is but a canvas in which the complexities of life in this world are writ large on the screen.

I haven't read Coben's novel, but I understand it takes place in America.  The Stranger unfolds in England, and feels perfectly situated there. It's peopled by top-notch British actors, including MI-5's Richard Armitage (who plays Adam Price in The Stranger) and Siobhan Finneran (DS Johanna Griffin in The Stranger) from Downton Abbey.  But everyone else in this series puts in some great acting, too, including Jacob Dudman as Adam's eldest son Thomas, and the always excellent Stephen Rea as the pivotal Martin Killane.

But I may have said too much already, and, if I were you, I'd stop reading about The Stranger, and snap it up asap.

 

Stay Close: Watch Soon

I thought a good way to start off the New Year would be a review of Stay Close, Harbin Coben's latest mini-series, on Netflix.  I've enjoyed all the series based on his novels, and Stay Close is one of the best.

[Believe or not, no big spoilers ahead.]

Lots of things to like in this classic Coben scenario of a woman about to be married, but, oops, she has a past with a different identity, in this case, just about knocking on her front door.

Among my favorite ingredients:

• James Nesbitt as Detective Broome -- I think of Broome as a British (actually, Northern Irish) Bosch, because, well, Nesbitt looks and acts a lot like Titus Welliver as Bosch, indefatigable, taking it on the chain, heart of gold. Nesbitt was excellent in Bloodlands, and, powerful, again, in Stay Close.
• 'Ken' and 'Barbie' are great villains, with a psycho banter and style right out of Clockwork Orange.
• And speaking of 'Barbie,' the women in Stay Close are every bit as dexterous with weapons as the men.  Refreshing to see, including in the protagonist Megan (very well played by Cush Jumbo).
• Another memorable character, Harry Sutton by Eddie Izzard.  And good to see Richard Armitage (MI5) again.

Now, as to the plot, I don't want to give too much away, so here's what I'll say.  This is a very complex story, with multiple victims and multiple suspects, and the ending surprised me, and since I'm usually pretty good at spotting who did what, I'd say it's likely to surprise you.

Which is a good thing.  Stay Close is easily bingeable and eminently rewarding,

No Second Chance: First Place Whodunnit

I'm continuing to feast on the international television and movies Netflix has been bringing us, ranging from Nordic Noir (Dicte and many more) to Cuban cop (Four Seasons in Havana) to Israeli undercover (Fauda).   France is well represented in this, too, with the superb Spiral, which I'll review after I've seen the 5th season on Netflix for free (cheapskate that I am), and Marseilles, which was quite good.

No Second Chance is another French winner, which arrived in France via New Jersey, where Harlan Coben, the American renowned mystery writer, lives and works.   Coben not only wrote No Second Chance, but has a nice cameo at the end, along with Dana Delaney, the only actor American audiences will recognize in this series.

The rest are French, and all excellent.  So is the narrative, which unlike a lot of high-octane kidnap stories, comes packaged with a first-class, whodunnit puzzler.  A father is shot to death, a mother shot and left for dead, and their six-month baby is kidnapped.   The mother, a medical doctor, recovers and sets out to find her baby.

But that won't happen until she or someone else solves the puzzle of what happened in the first place. Suffice to say it's not what it seems to be, as the main detective is just on edge of realizing.   There's a gap of time in the narrative - which was somewhat necessary for one of the crucial developments in the ending - but I think the story would have been even stronger and tighter without it.

But that's a small quibble about a compelling six-episode series,  crème de la crème for international and indeed all television.


silk noir

Safe: Dangerous

Just finished watching Safe, Harlan Coben's 8-hour mini-series that started streaming on Netflix on May 10.  Its closest competition for the apex of this kind of crime story is Broadchurch, where a death is investigated in a town in which just about everyone is a suspect - including parents of the victim and the police - but Safe is somehow even tighter, more harrowing, and more complex.

I won't say anything specific about the plot, because I don't want to give even an inch of it away.  I will say that there are shockers and red herrings galore, and, like all top-notch who-dunnits, thoroughly plausible in retrospect.  It's also just possible to guess some of the crucial components and villains, but not likely all of them, and I find this sort of tension and balance very much the essence of great mystery.

I can say a lot about the acting, because it gives nothing away.  Michael C. Hall makes his first return in a television series since Dexter, easily in the top 10 and maybe top 5 of all series ever in any form on television.   He's excellent, with a fine (to my New Yorker ears) British accent (yes, the story takes place in a gated-community in England, another reason it evokes Broadchurch).   Audrey Fleurot, who did such a good job in the French series Spiral and A French Village, is powerful in a supporting role in Safe, and I didn't mind at all she played a character somewhat similar to the one she played in A French Village.  Indeed, all the acting is top notch, and I got a special kick out of Nigel Lindsay (who plays Sir Robert Peel in Victoria), who almost provides comic relief as a beleaguered  father striving to protect his daughter and his family from the long arm of the law.

Indeed, Safe, like Broadchurch, is as much a dysfunctional family drama as it is a crime and police story.   The gated community seethes with dangerous pasts and relationships, and is anything but safe, which makes Safe such commanding viewing.

Fool Me Once: Double Stunning Ending

Whew, a wild and woolly Fool Me Once, and I defy anyone to predict the ending.  It's the latest Harlan Coben novel (2016) to be adapted to the screen, by Danny Brocklehurst, and up on Netflix yesterday, New Year's Day, where I binged it.  Yes, I watched all eight episodes, and what a pleasure it was to a watch a TV series that way, in which the episodes are like chapters in a book, where you can read as many as you want, at whatever pace you choose.  That used to be the defining hallmark of streaming, but it's rare indeed these days, and kudos to Netflix for starting off the year this way.

I should also say that I haven't read the novel, but I did read in the Radio Times that the stars said the TV adaption had "unputdownable" changes from the novel.  That's a good word.  I couldn't stop watching the series, and I can't think of any reason to put the series down, in the colloquial sense of the phrase.  In what follows, I'll tell you what I really liked about the series, and then what I would have liked the ending to be (which, again, is not a put down).

[And spoilers follow ... ]

My favorite character in the series was DS Sami Kierce.  Years ago, I wrote somewhere about what I called "the defective detective" on American TV -- Columbo was a schlep, Barnaby Jones an old geezer, Rockford lived in a beat-up trailer, you get the picture -- and Sami is the best rendition that I've seen of that in years.  He blacks out frequently,  the docs don't know what's wrong with him other than it's very serious, and he may not have long to live.  But he doggedly pursues the case, and it turns out that the greedy big pharma company responsible for most of the murders is also to blame for Sami's condition, due to the bad medicine they're putting on the market.  Adeel Akhtar does a memorable job as Sami, not surprising, given that he was equally memorable as Wilson Wilson in the British version of Utopia (much better than the American version, by the way).

Michelle Keegan, whom I haven't seen before, does a fine job as Maya Stern, the central character in the story, who delivers two surprises near the end: She's the one who kills her husband (because Maya realizes that Joe killed her sister, who was investigating the pharmaceutical company dishing out the bad medicine, a company owned and run by Joe's family).  And she sacrifices herself at the end -- literally, letting another member of the evil pharma family, Joe's younger brother Neil, shoot her with the loaded gun she deliberately left in plain site on the coffee table, so that the murder and the whole preceding discussion would be picked up on the camera she got placed in the room, so the whole world could see it happen in real time on the Internet.

Now that was one stunning ending indeed.  But here's what I think I would have preferred: the gun was loaded with blanks. Neil could still have been brought up on charges of attempted murder, and the diabolical mother (well played by Joanna Lumley, as always) would still have spilled out her self-incriminating story for the world and the police to all hear.

Now, I get that Maya was tormented by the bad call she made years earlier when she was in the military.  But she clearly loved her little girl Lily, and surely that would and should have given her an overpowering motivation to live.

But, hey, I'm a hopeless sucker for at least somewhat happy endings, and Fool Me Once was plenty appealing and commanding, just as it was.