The collaboration between Netflix and successful thriller writer Harlan Coben has produced a series of shows based on his novels. With I Will Find You, showrunner Robert Hull brings to the screen Coben’s 2023 bestseller to deliver the 13th adaptation. That’s not so surprising, since Coben is a prolific author.
Breaking from the tradition of transplanting Coben’s American stories into British or Spanish settings, I Will Find You returns the action to Boston and Maine in the United States. The result is an eight-episode, fast-paced melodrama, with an utterly unbelievable plot.
David Burroughs (Sam Worthington) is five years into a life sentence for the brutal murder of his three-year-old son, Matthew. David maintains his innocence, but also accepts the crushing savagery and loneliness of prison life. His wife, Cheryl (Erin Richards), has divorced him, remarried, and buried her trauma. The crime was motiveless but the case was open-and-shut complete with bloodied forensic evidence and a neighbor who swore she saw David burying the murder weapon in the woods.
His tense but uneventful life in prison is shattered when his sister-in-law Rachel Mills (Britt Lower) visits him with a casual vacation photograph taken at a theme park. Far in the blurred background of the frame stands a young boy with the unmistakable birthmark that Matthew had on his face – convenient for the plot. However difficult it may be to understand, since the dead kid matched David’s DNA, he is convinced his son is alive. When there are attempts to kill him in prison, his belief is confirmed.
With the help of the prison warden, also his godfather (Peter Outerbridge) and his son (Jonathan Tucker), who risk their careers, David breaks out of prison. Outside, Rachel agrees to put her life on hold to help him find Matthew, and maybe resurrect her career as a journalist, which was marred by a tragedy.
What follows is a classic chase to nab the fugitive, led by a bickering but dogged father-daughter duo (Chi McBride and Logan Browning). As he and Rachel pull at a very small string the whole mystery involving a wealthy and powerful Boston family unravels, with its formidable matriarch (Madeleine Stowe) and her slimy, politically ambitious son Hayden (Milo Ventimiglia).
No Coben story can be so simple, so there are convoluted subplots, red herrings, shifty characters and unapologetic absurdity; still every episode ends with a hook so I Will Find You is compulsively bingeable. There’s also a topnotch cast, a slick visual palate, brisk action and a genuinely emotional payoff at the end.
I Will Find You
Created by Robert Hull
Cast: Sam Worthington, Milo Wentimiglia, Britt Lower and others
On Netflix