This Netflix crime drama should be your first binge-watch of 2025

Missing You
★★★★
Netflix

If you’re a fan of crime writer Harlan Coben (and obviously a lot of us are; he’s sold more than 80 million books), you’ll likely be loving the adaptations of his twisty novels. This week, Missing You, based on his 2014 novel, has dropped on Netflix – the fifth in Coben’s 14-series deal with the streaming service.

Lenny Henry as Clint and Rosalind Eleazar as Kat in Missing You.Credit: Vishal Sharma/Netflix

As with other Coben adaptations, including Fool Me Once, The Stranger and Gone for Good, the action is transposed to Britain (Coben, who often serves as an executive producer, enjoys working with a British creative team, recently explaining on US talk show CBS Mornings that he thinks “there’s something that really seems to work in the hybrid of the American and the British that we put together in the shows”).

The screenplay for Missing You is by Victoria Asare-Archer, who wrote two episodes of the 2021 adaptation of Coben’s Stay Close, and she’s kept the plot suitably propulsive – the series comes in at a very bingeable five episodes.

The story stars Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses’ Louisa) as Kat Donovan, a detective specialising in missing persons cases. Eleven years earlier, her father, also a detective (played in flashback sequences by Lenny Henry), was killed on the job, and while the case is closed, Kat remains convinced that his death wasn’t properly investigated.

Eleazar as Kat and the man that took ghosting to an extreme, Josh (Ashley Walters).Credit: Vishal Sharma/Netflix

Eleazar is terrific as Kat – a complicated woman, but as a cop she takes no shit, as we learn in the opening scene. She’s enjoying herself on a blind date (with a man who thinks she’s an air hostess) when things take a dramatic turn: there’s a stabbing in the restaurant kitchen and Kat skilfully disarms the attacker.

Kat is dating, but she’s still grieving the loss of her former fiance and the love of her life, Josh (Top Boy’s Ashley Walters), who, shortly after Clint’s death, left her without a word of warning. In an extreme case of ghosting, he moved out of their lovely warehouse apartment, changed his number and deleted any trace of himself online.

Until, that is, Kat stumbles on his profile on a dating site that her private-eye mate Stacey (Jessica Plummer) has urged her to join. She’s torn – she still loves Josh – but eventually she “matches” with him on the app. And all is not, of course, what it seems.

Meanwhile, there’s a gruesome subplot involving prolific actor Steve Pemberton (you might remember him as an MI6 agent in Killing Eve) as a psychopathic dog breeder (seriously) abducting people in order to drain their bank accounts. When a young man comes to Kat to report his mum missing, things grow ever messier and intertwined.

All the while Kat is still determined to find out what really happened to her dad – was he really murdered by local underworld figure Monte Leburne (Marc Warren), who’s now dying in prison? Is Kat’s boss, Detective Stagger (Coben favourite Richard Armitage), holding back some information? And what are her friends hiding from her?

Chock-full of implausible but fun revelations – and a cameo from James Nesbitt as a charming crime boss – Missing You has all the Coben hallmarks, a great cast, and, unusually, something of a heartwarming ending.

Despite the pall of suspicion hanging over just about everyone, the regulation plot twists and the sadistic subplot, this is a Coben crime caper with a love story at its centre.

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