HARLAN COBEN’S SAFETHURSDAY

NETFLIX, FROM 10 MAY

rom the same creative team that F gave us Sky 1’s excellent mystery The Five in 2016 – namely, best-selling American novelist Harlan Coben, top British screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst (Come Home) and Red productions (Queer As Folk, Happy Valley) – comes this new, highly addictive eight-part drama boasting just as many twists and turns. Plus, all eight episodes are available next Thursday, in classic Netflix binge-able form.

GATED COMMUNITY

The show is set within a posh gated community in an un-named English suburb, where secrets and lies fester beneath the swanky, wellfurnished surface. The great Michael C Hall

(Six Feet Under, Dexter) plays Tom, a paediatric surgeon and widower whose wife died of cancer, leaving him to raise his two daughters on his own. Tom’s having a dalliance with neighbour Sophie, played by the awesome Amanda Abbington (Sherlock), who happens to be a police detective. When Tom’s teenage daughter doesn’t return home after attending a party, he launches a desperate search for her, while Sophie and her weirdly spiky new colleague Emma (Hannah Arterton) take on the official investigation.

DODGY NEIGHBOURS

Among the many neighbours who may or may not be involved in the disappearance of Tom’s daughter are Sophie’s estranged husband Josh (Emmett J Scanlan), who lives in a caravan parked in her drive; larger-thanlife couple Jojo (Nigel Lindsay) and Lauren (Laila Rouass) ; Tom’s sharp best mate and colleague Pete (Marc Warren); and Zoe

(Spiral ’s Audrey Fleurot), an enigmatic French teacher who, like pretty much everyone we meet in the show, has her own dark secrets.

PERFECT PLOTTING

From the two episodes we’ve seen, this feels like a total triumph, with Coben’s mastery of taut plotting and penchant for dizzying surprise revelations matching perfectly with Brocklehurst’s gift for authentic characters and dialogue. Abbington’s witty, no-nonsense cop is a world away from the usual clichés, and her chemistry with uptight, paranoid everyman Hall is effortless. We’ll be devouring the rest in one sitting. HHHHH Boyd Hilton