Harlan Coben Reveals Why ‘I Will Find You’ Is Set in the U.S. Instead of the U.K. (Exclusive)

Harlan Coben‘s latest series adaptation at Netflix, I Will Find You, marks a first for the prolific author: It’s the first of the streaming shows to be set in the United States. Before that, he’d seen a dozen of his books adapted in the U.K. instead.

Why? Well, Coben has explained in the past, on CBS Mornings, “I have this great team over there. This is the fourth show we have done, some of you maybe saw The Stranger on Netflix or Stay Close, and so, working with this team is just a lot of fun. And so we just take the story and move it over, and I think that hybrid makes it richer, you see this cool house, sort of Downton Abbey-ish. So the combination of the American story with the hybrid of the British sensibilities, I think it makes the series a little bit better.” The author added, “Overseas, you can hide a bit more there.” The team he’s referring to includes Nicola Schindler and Richard Fee at Red Production Company, along with Danny Brocklehurst, with whom he recently released Harlan Coben’s Run Away.

With I Will Find You, which was created by Robert Hull, though, the decision was made to bring the action back to the States.

“Well, it’s great to stop getting a note, ‘Not everybody has a gun in the U.K.,’” Coben joked to TV Insider of the difference. “Of course, there’s a lot less gunfire and things like that.”

Coben then added, “The books are placed here, so it was interesting … part of the fun sometimes for me when you adapt is you’re changing even the location, but here we got to do the exact location that we wanted, and that was also really fun. When we did our first American series, we wanted a big story that we thought would really land in a special kind of a way with a special team, and Robbie and I had gotten together and wanted to make a show together, and when we chose I Will Find You, I was still writing the novel. Robbie and I were looking for something to do, and I said, ‘I’m writing this novel now,’ and I told him, I gave him the pitch, and his eyes went wide, and he’s like, ‘That’s the one I want, that’s the one, don’t tell anybody else.’ .. Went to Netflix, Netflix is like, ‘Oh, it’s a novel?’ Like, ‘Well, not yet, but it will be.’ And so Robbie was actually working already on the adaptation while I was writing it up. … And so that made it all the more interesting, and we just felt that this happened to be the time that we did the show in the United States.”

I Will Find You, which takes place mostly in Boston, centers on David Burroughs (Sam Worthington), a man who has been wrongly convicted of murdering his own son and makes a jailbreak after seeing a picture he believes to be the child who’d been killed.

I Will Find You, Streaming Now, Netflix