I’m back again to defend (and briefly complain about) yet another Harlan Coben series on Netflix! Recently my husband and I watched I Will Find You, and tbh I loved it; but after finishing it, I went to look it up online, and discovered that, apparently, everyone hates this one too, possibly even more than they hated Run Away. Why, I wonder? Why are people so mad at what is basically the quintessential crime thriller?

Apparently, folks’ issue with this limited series is that it is exactly that: the characters are all two-dimensional and tropey, and the plot, while addictive and gripping, is basically junk food.

All true, for the most part! – But so what! What were you expecting? Who comes to a Harlan Coben thriller on Netflix expecting a mind-blowing literary masterpiece? He does what he does, and he does it well; let it be what it is. I love literary masterpieces as much as the next person, but personally, I found this series a great deal of fun, pure escapist fun. I appreciate these Harlan Coben shows because they don’t claim to be anything other than what they are. And for what they are, they’re really well done.

I will admit this, though: after watching Run Away a while back, I decided to try reading the book. And I was surprised and disappointed to find that, although I’d loved the show, I couldn’t really get into the book. Harlan Coben’s writing style just isn’t as fun for me on paper as it is on the screen – and normally, I like the book better! It just feels like he’s writing for the screen specifically. If I want to watch Netflix I’ll watch Netflix, but if I want to read a book, I want it to feel like a book, and to have a bit more, I dunno, finesse, or depth, or something.

But this show was great. Don’t let the haters sway you.

What I liked about this one specifically: often, in these shows, the police are incompetent and the real work of solving the mystery is left up to the characters, the rogues, the private investigators. But in this one, the cops are actually really smart, really quick, and right on the main characters’ tail, right from the get-go. That really amped up the suspense!

Also, I liked that I didn’t see the big twist about the villain coming. If you’ve watched it, you know what I’m talking about. My husband, who’s a major cinephile and watches a ton of shows and movies, always guesses the plot twist before it happens, and he predicted this one about ten minutes before they revealed it; when he guessed it, I was like “no, please, don’t let that be it!”, because I really didn’t want it to go that way… but I knew it probably would because my husband is always right. Damn!

I also am willing to die on this particular hill: the aforementioned villain was actually a well-fleshed-out and sympathetic character, the most interesting and complex one of the whole show. I think this was mostly due to the actor who played them – phenomenal job. I actually felt genuinely sad for this character at the end of the show, which is a mark of incredible storytelling work imo, considering what this villain had done. I’m trying not to give any spoilers here because I really do think you should go watch the show.

One last little silly thing that I loved: it’s almost an Easter egg how Madeleine Stowe has a major role, and if you remember, she played Cora in Last of the Mohicans (1992), which of course had a noteworthy song on its soundtrack called I Will Find You, named after one of the most poignant and oft-quoted lines of dialouge in the whole movie. Did anyone else find that amusing, or just me?!

However, I do have one complaint – and this is where the spoilers come in, so if you haven’t watched it yet, stop reading here – and I’m willing to bet that it’s simply a case of the show being created by mostly men who don’t know much about this topic:

One of the big surprises that’s revealed is that the wife, Cheryl, was already pregnant at the time that she went to the fertility clinic for artificial insemination. She didn’t realize it, but the day after the procedure she took an early HPT and it was positive.

This, I simply did not believe. I don’t agree with artificial insemination or reproductive technology in general, ethically, but I know enough about it to know that artificial insemination is done during a very specific point in your cycle. They’d probably want to do it on ovulation day or the day before, so they’d be really careful about charting the woman’s cycle and make the appointment for a specific day. There’s simply no way that this appointment would be booked late in the luteal phase – 9 dpo is about the very earliest a woman could possibly see a + on an early-result HPT. And a reproductive clinic simply would not book her insemination appointment for eight days past ovulation. That’s ridiculous. You cannot get pregnant after ovulation is over, at all! There are even be physical changes post ovulation, things like the position of the cervix actually moves, which I imagine a reproductive medicine practitioner would catch immediately.

Now I guess it’s possible that her cycles were wonky and ovulation was unpredictable, and maybe it came eight days early that cycle – but if it had, she would have known. She definitely would have known. A woman who’s been TTC for a very long time, as she had, is not going to miss her fertile window like that. She’ll have been charting intensely and obsessing about it for many months. She will always be aware of exactly where in her cycle she is, whether she wants to be thinking about it or not.

So yeah, that’s the only part that I found distractingly unbelieveable. Maybe it’s explained more convincingly in the book somehow, I don’t know. I’m not going to read the book. I probably will watch more Harlan Coben shows on Netflix though!