I Will Find You review – seen one maddeningly watchable Harlan Coben adaptation? You’ve seen them all | Television

A lever groans, a pipe judders and thunk; another length of premium-grade bunkum is extruded from the Harlan Coben Industrial Adaptation Complex™. This particular emission – an eight-part assemblage of fists and mumbling entitled I Will Find You – is the 13th of Coben’s novels to have been processed by Netflix as part of a 14-book deal. Which means – the pulse quickens – there is now just one more to go. On Netflix, at least. The author’s ongoing deal with Amazon suggests we could be trapped in an ever-spiralling cycle of preposterous thrillers for eternity. May God have mercy on our souls.

Helpfully, Netflix has titled its cluster of adaptations “The Harlan Coben Collection”, which makes them sound like the type of ceramic figurines advertised at the back of Sunday supplements: Regency belles, say, or dogs dressed as fictional detectives. Stun your family by collecting them all! Alternatively, watch just one – any one – of these adaptations and relax in the knowledge that you have now in effect seen them all, and thus need never again subject yourself to the sight of hitherto respectable actors remaining straight-faced while delivering lines of the “The past never changes. Until one day it does” genus.

I Will Find You, then. The gist is, as usual, this: somebody is missing. Somebody else is accused of a crime wot they did not do. The police are inept and/or corrupt, there is much scowling in expensive leisurewear, and everybody from stoic hero to snarling baddie speaks. Like this. To imply a sense of urgency. And gravitas. Whereas it merely makes them sound as if. They’re just back from. Zumba.

In a startling break with Netflix-Coben tradition, I Will Find You is set not in Europe but the US, which means the breathlessness comes with bigger guns and the captions shout things like BOSTON rather than LONDON, ENGLAND. In every other respect, however, I Will Find You is classic small-screen Coben, which is to say: maddeningly watchable crap with bells on.

So here is David Burroughs (Sam Worthington), a muscular everyman serving a life sentence in a Maine penitentiary for the murder of his young son. And yet he is innocent. Innocent, do you hear? But nobody believes our unshaven hero and so his days are spent dolefully punching fellow prisoners while immersed in thoughts of self-reproach (“A father’s job is to protect his child from harm. I failed,” etc).

Until! Ex-sister-in-law – and disgraced investigative journalist – Rachel Mills (Britt “Severance” Lower) turns up with a recent photograph of a frolicking youngster who looks very much like … no. Surely not. But yes. It seems David’s son may not be dead after all. “If there’s a chance …” gasps Rachel, pointing to the fact that said frolicker sports an identical birthmark to the formerly-dead Matthew, “… no matter how impossible, that he’s somehow still alive …”

And with that we’re off, bustin’ outta prison in the (complicit) governor’s Toyota Testosterone and straight into what Rachel’s ex-editor calls “the story of a lifetime!” He’s wrong, of course (it’s the story of eight 40-ish minute episodes plus ads), but there is enough “gas” in the tank to ensure an eventful ride for all.

Slowly, a labyrinthine global conspiracy unfolds and David and Rachel are up to their fugitive nostrils in questions: where is David’s son? If it wasn’t Matthew who was murdered, who was it? And who is the shadowy puppet-master to whom everyone from shifty prison warden to icy charity boss keeps sending cryptic texts?

The upshot? Palpable cobblers. The script is made of Play-Doh and our protagonists are but flaps of luncheon meat pegged to a washing line. And yet still we must – must! – find out what happens. And so we stagger, dazed, into the next episode. And the episode after that. Until many, many red herrings, narrative cul-de-sacs and splutter-inducing plot holes later, we are deposited at the end of another Coben adaptation with virtually no memory of how we got there. Confound it! That’s 13 down, one (??) to go. Stay strong, everyone.