Mystery writer Harlan Coben has quietly become something of a secret weapon for Netflix. Released without fanfare in January 2024, his bonkers potboiler Fool Me Once was one of the streamer’s biggest hits of the year. It clocked up millions of views without requiring a megabudget, a starry cast or a production schedule counted in decades rather than weeks (as is the case with the long-awaited final serving of Stranger Things).
Twelve months later, as regular as clockwork or as a diligent serial killer, the American writer is back as executive producer of Missing You (Netflix from Jan 1st). Here is another of his UK-set whodunits with a convoluted plot and soap opera-level acting. Oh, and there’s a bit of a part for Richard Armitage, legally obliged to appear in all of Coben’s Netflix spin-offs.
It’s pleasing post-Christmas hokum, featuring Rosalind Eleazar of Slow Horses in the familiar guise of a hard-nosed lady cop with a tumultuous personal life. One by one, the cliches are ticked off. Would you be surprised, for instance, to hear that Eleazar’s Kat Donovan is professionally successful but romantically all at sea? Or that – to the frustration of her well-meaning friends – she seeks out casual sex and has difficulty forging lasting human connections?
Pride of place among her many personal dramas was the sudden disappearance several years ago of her fiance Josh (Top Boy’s Ashley Cole) and the killing, around the same time, of her policeman father (Lenny Henry in flashbacks) by a notorious criminal. Her personality forged in heartbreak, Kat is hard bitten and broiled in cynicism. But goodnesses, what a copper she is – as we see in an early scene, she is capable of disarming an unhinged, cleaver-wielding chef twice her size with a few swift jabs to the solar plexus.
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Her latest case involves the disappearance of a man whose car has been found abandoned in the countryside and who we see on horseback in a crazed panic. But the investigation coincides with the sudden reappearance of her ex on a dating site and news about her father’s killer that stirs up painful memories of the death. It’s all happening simultaneously – as it invariably does when Coben pulls the strings.
It’s packed with cameos. Armitage is Kat’s gruff colleague who may or may not be corrupt. James Nesbitt twirls his moustache as a slick gangland boss with a possible connection to Kat’s father back in the day. Best of all is Inside Number 9′s Steve Pemberton as an obnoxious breeder.
Eleazar has her work cut out, playing Kat as both a brusque crime-solving machine and a vulnerable person with a scorched-earth personal life. As is traditional with Coben, the plot, moreover, has more hairpin turns than a boreen in west Cork, and viewers are asked to suspend their disbelief from the outset.
But Missing You – adapted from Coben’s 2014 bestseller – is competently done and walks the right line between po-faced and silly, while the backdrop of Manchester and Bolton gives the whole affair an undertow of grim grittiness. Coben fans (they are legion) will savour it as the new year’s gift that keeps on giving.
