Harlan Coben has sold more than 90 million books worldwide, many of them — including one he cowrote last year with actress Reese Witherspoon — bestsellers. With nearly 40 titles released during his 30-year career, he’s one of the most prolific mystery and thriller writers working today. According to this official website, his works have been translated into 46 languages.

His global popularity has led to a dozen of his novels — which often feature ridiculous plots, dark crimes and a flurry of unexplainable twists — being adapted into pulpy, B-rate television shows and movies for streaming. Michael C. Hall, Minnie Driver and Sam Claflin have headlined their own shows. British actor Richard Armitage pops up in several of them. Avatar’s Sam Worthington stars in the next one, I Will Find You, likely arriving later this year.

Coben’s most recent mystery adaptation, Netflix’s Run Away, starring James Nesbitt as a father searching for his runaway daughter, even outranked the final season of Stranger Things after it was released on Jan. 1.

So, why are Harlan Coben adaptations — many of which take place in Europe, despite the original novels being set in America — so addictive, if they’re all a bit “middling”?

“It’s the fact that these shows sweep you along, like no thought is required,” Eleanor Biggs, an audio producer at the Guardian who has seen all of Harlan Coben’s adaptations, tells Yahoo. “It’s a mystery, but the mystery is often nonsensical. You couldn’t solve it because it itself makes no sense.”

But even a “nonsensical” thriller can be a tonic. “Life is very stressful, and there’s something about the twists and turns [in a] Harlan Coben series that is so disorienting that it becomes [almost] a relaxing experience,” she says.

Born in Newark, N.J., the 64-year-old Coben — whom the New York Times called the quintessential “suburban dad” — signed a 9-year, 14-title deal with Netflix in 2018, though that’s just part of his TV portfolio. Both 2023’s Shelter, the small-screen adaptation of his young-adult novel of the same name, and the 2025 U.K. miniseries Lazarus, an original project co-created by Coben rather than an adaptation, streamed on Prime Video. Earlier this month, CBS premiered the weekly unscripted true-crime series, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, in which the author unravels “gripping tales of murder and high-profile crimes” where nothing is as it seems. The first episode attracted 1.5 million viewers.

Scroll through X or TikTok on any given day and there’s no shortage of fans expressing their shock over the newest Harlan Coben series’s “wild” ending or lamenting the fact that they wasted hours plowing through every episode of his “latest Netflix slop.” “They’re like a palate cleanser for your brain,” one critic wrote on Substack of these annual offerings, “something to watch in between stints with highly regarded productions that really have something to say.”

Biggs considers them a fix for “our dopamine-starved brains.” “So much happens [in these shows and movies], it’s almost like watching Instagram reels,” she says. “It’s like an ongoing forward motion. Something else is happening. Does it make sense? Not really, but we’re still moving [on].”

Though the stories are quite dark (murders, deaths and disturbing crimes are at the crux of the investigations), they’re often “packaged in quite a sugary shell, which makes it more palatable,” Biggs notes. “Scary stuff is happening, but it’s not presented in a particularly scary way. It’s almost sometimes a bit like a spoof.”

Stay Close, the 2021 British drama inspired by Coben’s 2012 novel, is a prime example, she says.

The series followed a suburban mom, played by The Good Fight’s Cush Jumbo, who left her job as an exotic dancer and began a new chapter dangerously close to where she used to live. “You already had to suspend disbelief that for 15 years no one knew she was the [missing] person,” Biggs says. And that’s not the craziest part: In the show, an unassuming couple, named Barbie and Ken, perform synchronized dances before they commit murder.

“I would do anything to be in the Harlan Coben writers’ room and learn what gets decided,” she says. “It’s this fusion of something that is actually quite believable and something which is so off the wall” that makes them compelling.

Jason Lynch, curator at the Paley Center for Media, says there’s inherent value in continually producing reliable and easy-to-digest content with no expectation that people are tuning in for its award-worthy storytelling.

“It’s comfort food for audiences who have missed these [types of] procedurals that used to be the backbone of TV,” he tells Yahoo. Plus, there’s something to be said about “delving into all the aspects of a book that people really love” — in this case, leaning into the twisty nature of a Harlan Coben mystery: “You basically already know you’ve got built-in cliffhangers.”

Aubrey Devens, a stay-at-home working mom and analyst from Gilbert, Ariz., first learned of Coben’s works during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like many people at the time, she was looking for “something binge-worthy” and discovered a collection of his shows and movies on Netflix. Devens was “immediately hooked.” Though some viewers have balked at the abundance of red herrings in Coben’s stories, Devens sees them as “layered.”

“Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. I will think I’ve figured it out, and another twist completely changes the picture,” Devens tells Yahoo. “I also love how personal the stakes feel — family, secrets, trust and betrayal are always at the center. When a new show comes out, I know I’m getting something that will keep me guessing and emotionally invested the entire time.”

Safe, which starred Michael C. Hall (who is American) as a British surgeon whose teenage daughter goes missing, and The Innocent, a Spanish-language adaptation about a law student who attempts to start his life nearly a decade after accidentally killing a man, are Devens’s personal picks. “Safe stands out because … every episode pulls the rug out from under you, and nothing feels predictable. The Innocent is a favorite because the storyline is absolutely insane in the best way; it’s dark, complex and completely consuming.”

Mia Farrell, an eyelash technician from North Wales, U.K., began watching Harlan Coben adaptations in 2018 when Safe was first released and now tracks new shows when they’re out, posting reaction videos to her TikTok.

She’s grown fond of the Harlan Coben universe because each release is just as “gripping” and “interesting” as the last one, she tells Yahoo. “There’s never a part which is boring.” Case in point: She wasn’t planning on watching Run Away in one sitting, but binged it in a few hours. “I couldn’t turn it off!”

It’s that promise of unpredictability, no matter how ludicrous things get in the story, that is part of the appeal of Harlan Coben’s world, Biggs says.

“You truly never know what’s coming around the corner — and that, I think, is what makes it a true guilty pleasure."