As a writer, Harlan Coben has always known how to hook readers fast. In 1990, after his first novel Play Dead landed a publisher, he told The New York Times , “Maybe my secret weapon is that I’m lucky, or that I wrote a book that is easy to get into, so that from page one, the reader wants to keep reading.”

The prolific crime novelist has brought the same strategy to the eminently bingeable adaptations bearing his name. This streaming fodder, made in collaboration with other screenwriters, has become a brand unto itself. While the 64-year-old Coben has now written 35 novels, at the rate of one a year, his TV catalogue was turbocharged in 2018 by a five-year deal with Netflix . That deal granted rights to 14 of his standalone novels and first right of refusal on new TV ideas.…