In its first four days on Netflix, I Will Find You drew 24 million views. The eight-episode limited series — starring Sam Worthington as a father convicted of murdering his son, who he learns may still actually be alive — sat at No. 1 on Netflix’s global chart for weeks, and at over 120 million views, it currently sits at No. 5 on the streamer’s all-time most-popular list.
The scale of the Netflix partnership, which Coben signed in 2018 and which has been renewed twice since, is considerable. According to Netflix, his adaptations have made the streamer’s weekly global Top 10 list 41 times, reached the Top 10 in 93 countries, and accumulated more than 450 million views since 2023. Fool Me Once, the 2024 adaptation starring Michelle Keegan, drew 107.5 million views in its first six months and made the all-time most-popular list. Run Away, which premiered before I Will Find You, added another 50 million earlier this year. Netflix extended Coben’s deal again in May.
Additionally, in January, CBS premiered Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, an unscripted true crime series with Coben as host and executive producer. Susan Zirinsky, who ran 48 Hours for 23 years, is also executive producing. The show’s second season began in October. Also this fall, Coben published Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, a memoir and writing guide that was praised by no less than John Grisham.
At 64, Coben has reached a point where he looks over what could be considered an empire: 38 novels, with more than 100 million copies in print, translations in 46 languages, active television projects on Netflix and CBS, and that memoir. He even co-wrote a novel with actress Reese Witherspoon.
My introduction to Harlan Coben came through Netflix, not his books. After watching several adaptations of his novels, I had somehow convinced myself he was a British author. I’ve always enjoyed crime fiction set in and around New York, particularly Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder novels and Lawrence Sanders’s stories featuring the tough Irish police officer Edward X. Delaney. When I discovered that Coben was actually from New Jersey, and that his novels were set in the suburbs of New Jersey and in New York City, I decided to pick one up. I’ve been reading him ever since.
Coben was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Livingston, a suburb in Essex County. His high-school classmate and friend was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He left the state to attend Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he studied political science. One of his fraternity brothers was author Dan Brown, who would go on to write the international bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. After graduating in 1984, Coben returned to his home state and worked at his grandfather’s travel company.
It was during that stretch that he wrote the novel Play Dead, a romantic suspense thriller. The book was accepted for publication when he was 26 and released in 1990. There was no rejection pile, no years of trying to convince agents to read his manuscript. His first novel found a publisher on the first pass, which separates his origin story from those of so many other bestselling novelists working in the same genre. Coben himself has acknowledged that despite the publication, the book has limitations. In later editions, he included a note that basically told readers to skip it and start somewhere else.
Coben remains a New Jersey resident. He and his wife, Anne Armstrong-Coben, a pediatrician he met at Amherst, live in Ridgewood, a small town in Bergen County, in a blue-and-gray Second Empire Victorian house that they bought in 1999. In an interview with the New York Times, he said he had “panic attacks about living in a house this cool.” The house, with its mansard roof and ornamental trim, looks like it could take up a scene in one of his novels. That is not a coincidence. Coben, like many other contemporary authors, writes about what he knows, and what he knows is his home state. “My novels are very specific, for the most part, about suburban New Jersey,” he told NPR in 2009. He has used suburban towns in New Jersey as settings in most of his books, a setting that matches the milieus of his readership and invites them to contemplate families with secrets, public displays that don’t match what goes on in private, and the off chance that everyday life could fall apart over something no one saw coming.
The Myron Bolitar series, which began with Deal Breaker in 1995, established his readership. The books follow a former college basketball star whose NBA career ended with an injury, pushing him into a second life as a sports agent who somehow manages to stumble upon criminal matters. Bolitar is funny and self-aware, and despite having no law enforcement background, he has the courage of a police officer. His best friend, Win Lockwood, is a blue-blooded socialite with impeccable tailoring, a thirst for ladies of the night, and a fondness for violence. He is the kind of character who, at first glance, might be mistaken for someone more interested in a cocktail party than fighting. However, he is as deadly as anyone in crime fiction, whether with a gun, a knife, or his bare hands. The pairing works because each is unique and present as a pair that should never get along but are the best of friends. Coben has called Bolitar his “most prized possession.”
Netflix is bringing Bolitar to the screen for the first time. Production began in New York and New Jersey in late July. The first season draws primarily from Drop Shot, the second novel in the series. Unlike every previous Coben adaptation on Netflix, which have all been limited series, Bolitar is designed to run for multiple seasons. That makes it a significant bet for both Coben and the platform. If it works, Netflix has found a franchise character.
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But Coben’s standalone novels have been most popular with readers. Tell No One, published in 2001, was the breakout hit; books such as The Stranger and Fool Me Once followed. The structure across these novels is consistent: an ordinary person in an ordinary suburb discovers that something they took as settled — a death, a disappearance, a marriage — was built on a lie. Coben has the gift of creating page-turners, and no one is better with endings that never seem formulaic. In Think Twice, a Bolitar novel published in 2024, the identity of the killer seems obvious by the end because everything has been pointing in the same direction. When the final chapters arrive, the twist hits like a punch to the gut. It is surprising, but never implausible. The line between good and bad shifts late and without warning, but what we perceive as shifts are simply reflections of the fact that we have been looking in the wrong direction the whole time.
Would it surprise anyone that Coben’s production company, through which all his television projects are produced, is called Final Twist Productions? Coben, who would otherwise be closing in on retirement age, shows no signs of slowing down. The secret to his staying power is that even when readers know what to expect from one of his novels, they rarely know what’s coming next. He has spent decades writing about secrets, disappearances, and families whose lives are turned upside down, yet he continues to find new ways to surprise his audience. The formula is familiar. The stories never quite are.
Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a writer living in Florida.