The prolific crime author’s latest Netflix thriller I Will Find You has become one of the streamer’s most-watched shows of all time – but what’s his secret?

Netflix’s all-time top 10 English language series chart is starting to look like a stale old thing. It is topped by Wednesday, which is four years old, and includes dusty old hits including Stranger Things season four (four years old), Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (four years old), The Queen’s Gambit (six years old), and Bridgerton season one (six years old).

But wait. Just before you write off Netflix as a platform half a decade past its peak, a plucky new entry has entered the all-time top 10 to liven things up. That show is I Will Find You, the latest belched out from the glistening ovipositor of Harlan Coben. If you’re a fan of Coben’s work – and we’ll get into that in due course – then I Will Find You will be instantly recognisable, since it bears many of the author’s hallmarks.

Severance’s Britt Lower stars in Netflix’s latest lot of cobblers. It’s an eight-part saga of fists and mumbling, with a script made from Play-Doh

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.