Netflix Has Lined Up the Next Two UK-set Harlan Coben Book Adaptations

Mr Richard Armitage, book the kitchen fitters and treat yourself to one of those taps that dispenses sparkling water, because you’re about to get paid. Netflix has confirmed that two new UK-set Harlan Coben adaptations are on the way, from the team behind Fool Me Once, Stay Close and The Stranger.

Next up for the Coben book-to-screen treatment in the UK is Missing You. Published in 2014, it’s the story of police detective Kat Donovan, whose life – in true Harlan Coben tradition – is turned upside down when her missing fiancé Josh (it was Jeff in the book) suddenly reappears on a dating site. Expect secrets, intrigue and grisly deaths to play out against a backdrop of expansive Carrera marble kitchen islands, Heals sofas, and £80k Range Rovers.

No cast has yet been announced for Missing You, but filming starts in spring 2024 so we can expect to hear who’ll be in it soon. If tradition is being followed, then Harlan Coben one-man-band Richard Armitage will be somewhere in the mix (so far he’s played Adam in The Stranger, Ray in Stay Close and Joe in Fool Me Once), and the new series will air in very early 2025. As Coben told RadioTimes.com in December 2023, he and the production team are keen to fill Netflix’s January 1^st New Year’s hangover TV boxset slot.

Following in Missing You’s wake will be an adaptation of Coben’s 2019 novel Run Away, about a man who attempts to rescue his eldest daughter from a life of addiction and abuse. There’s no filming date, and obviously no cast announcements yet on that one, but we might expect it to start in early 2025 ready for a January 2026 air date.

Run Away is being written by Danny Brocklehurst, who has led the writing teams on all five of the previous UK-set adaptations produced by Nicola Schindler and Richard Fee (read our guide to them all here). Missing You comes written by Brocklehurst collaborator and Stay Close and Death in Paradise writer Victoria Asare-Archer.

The two new commissions were clearly in the works before 2024’s Fool Me Once was released, but its huge success on the streamer gave them the official stamp. That series starred Michelle Keegan as a former army captain and helicopter pilot who sees her dead husband appear on their daughter’s Nanny Cam, and sets about investigating what his wealthy family might be hiding. Like every UK-set Harlan Coben series, it’s a twist factory precision-engineered to keep you on the sofa and pressing ‘Next Episode’ until you resemble Charlie Day in that oft-used Always Sunny evidence wall gif.

Over on Netflix Poland, the Coben train continues to chug along with a brand new adaptation of Just One Look coming. It’s a first for the Coben Cinematic Universe as the novel has already been adapted for screen once before. In 2017, French channel TF1 aired a version of the story starring Virginie Ledoyen in which an improbably beautiful park ranger is sent a photograph of her husband as a much younger man that he denies is really him, before he mysteriously disappears. Quelle histoire.

Fool Me Once is available to stream now on Netflix.