In the shadowy corridors of modern thrillers, where grief morphs into ghosts and the past refuses to stay buried, Harlan Coben reigns supreme. His labyrinthine tales of suburban paranoia and buried betrayals have hooked millions, from the pulse-racing twists of The Stranger to the gut-wrenching revelations of Fool Me Once. But with Lazarus, dropping all six episodes on Prime Video this October 22, Coben doesn’t just dig up old bones – he resurrects them, stitching together a horror-tinged tapestry of psychological dread that’s equal parts family drama and forensic fever dream. Imagine returning home for a funeral, only to find the house whispering accusations, the walls bleeding memories, and your sanity slipping like sand through clenched fists. Starring the magnetic Sam Claflin and the inimitable Bill Nighy, this mind-bending miniseries isn’t content with mere suspense; it claws at the raw nerves of loss, legacy, and the lies we tell ourselves to sleep at night. You will NOT want to miss this one – because once the credits roll on that finale, you’ll be sleeping with the lights on, questioning every shadow in your own hallway.

At its core, Lazarus pulses with the kind of intimate terror that Coben does best: the horror of the familiar turned foul. Created and penned by Coben alongside his frequent collaborator Danny Brocklehurst – the BAFTA-winning scribe behind Stay Close and The Stranger – the series marks a bold pivot for the author. Unlike his novel adaptations, this is an original screenplay forged for the small screen, a six-hour descent into the Lazarus family vault where resurrection comes at a blood price. Directed by the visionary Wayne Yip (She-Hulk, Gentleman Jack), whose kinetic style blends taut tension with hallucinatory flair, the production wrapped filming in the rain-slicked streets of Manchester and the fog-shrouded moors of the Yorkshire Dales. It’s a visual feast of muted grays and flickering fluorescents, where every rain-lashed windowpane reflects not just the weather, but the fractured psyches within. Executive produced by Coben, Brocklehurst, Nicola Shindler (It’s a Sin), and Richard Fee, with Claflin joining the producers’ circle, Lazarus feels like a passion project polished to a razor edge – a thriller that doesn’t just entertain, but excavates.

Leading the charge is Sam Claflin as Joel Lazarus, the forensic psychologist whose clinical mind unravels faster than a cheap sweater in a storm. Claflin, the chiseled everyman who swung from The Hunger Games‘ Finnick Odair to Peaky Blinders‘ sly Billy Walsh, brings a brooding intensity to Joel that’s equal parts haunted and heroic. His Joel is a man armored in academia – sharp suits over scarred souls – who fled his childhood home two decades ago after a tragedy that shattered the family like cheap crystal. Returning after his father’s apparent suicide, Joel’s poised facade cracks under the weight of unwelcome homecomings: dusty photo albums that stare back accusingly, a sister’s ghost in every empty room, and the creeping certainty that Dad’s “goodbye” note was anything but final. Claflin’s performance is a masterclass in micro-expressions – a twitch of the jaw when memories ambush him, eyes darting like a cornered animal – making Joel’s spiral from skeptic to seer both heartbreaking and hypnotic.

Opposite him, Bill Nighy materializes as Dr. Jonathan Lazarus, the patriarch whose spectral presence looms larger than life even in death. Nighy, the Oscar-nominated thespian of Love Actually‘s wry romance and Pirates of the Caribbean‘s undead Davenport, infuses Jonathan with a tragic grandeur: a once-brilliant surgeon whose hands, now cold in a coffin, once saved lives but couldn’t mend his own. Through flashbacks that flicker like faulty home movies, we see Jonathan’s unraveling – a man haunted by hubris, whispering to shadows in his study, his salt-and-pepper beard framing a face etched with unspoken sins. Nighy’s voice, that velvet rumble laced with melancholy, narrates Joel’s doubts via voicemails and therapy tapes, turning the good doctor into a posthumous puppet master whose “suicide” feels less like an end and more like an invitation. It’s a role that lets Nighy flex his dramatic chops, blending avuncular warmth with chilling calculation, ensuring that even in rigor mortis, Jonathan steals every scene.

The ensemble orbits this father-son vortex like planets pulled into a black hole, each adding gravitational pull to the plot’s inexorable spin. Alexandra Roach, the Welsh firecracker from Utopia and The Batman, embodies Jenna Lazarus, Joel’s estranged sister and the emotional linchpin of the family fracture. Jenna’s a whirlwind of guarded affection and buried rage – a single mom juggling night shifts at a diner with nightmares that bleed into her days. Roach nails the sibling bond with Claflin, their scenes crackling with the unspoken shorthand of shared trauma: a hesitant hug that lingers too long, a shared cigarette under porch light where accusations fly like sparks. As Seth McGovern, the affable but oily family friend who’s suspiciously eager to “help” with the estate, David Fynn (Undateable, Ghosts) brings a layer of comic menace – think the uncle who overpours your whiskey while probing your weaknesses, his easy grin hiding teeth filed sharp.

Karla Crome (Under the Dome, The Capture) slinks in as Bella Catton, Joel’s sharp-tongued colleague and reluctant confidante, a criminologist whose skepticism clashes with his growing paranoia like flint on steel. Their banter – laced with forensic jargon and flirtatious jabs – provides rare breaths of levity in the gloom, but Crome’s Bella harbors her own skeletons, turning ally into enigma. Rounding out the core is Kate Ashfield (Sanditon, This Is England) as Detective Alison Brown, the no-nonsense copper assigned to Jonathan’s case. Ashfield’s Alison is all blunt Yorkshire pragmatism – a bob haircut framing a face that brooks no bullshit – but her dogged pursuit of leads unearths Lazarus lore that makes her as much predator as protector. Newcomer Ewan Horrocks pops up in flashbacks as young Joel, his wide-eyed innocence a stark foil to Claflin’s weary warrior, while bit players like a cryptic coroner (played by the gravel-voiced John Heffernan) and a spectral neighbor (Rosie Cavaliero’s gossipy turn) pepper the periphery with red herrings and revelations.

The main plot threads of Lazarus weave a noose of nostalgia and nightmare, tightening with each episode until escape seems impossible. It kicks off in the sterile hush of a London psych ward, where Joel fields a frantic call from Jenna: “Dad’s gone. Hung himself in the garage. Come home.” Home is the crumbling Georgian manse in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eldridge – a place of peeling wallpaper and locked attics, where the Lazarus name still echoes with faded glory. Episode one immerses us in the funeral rites: awkward eulogies from Seth, Jenna’s tear-streaked accusations of paternal neglect, and Joel’s ritual sifting of Jonathan’s effects – yellowed case files from unsolved murders, a pocket watch stopped at 3:17 (the exact time of his sister’s death 25 years prior). But as Joel settles into the guest room, the uncanny creeps in: footsteps in empty halls, a child’s laughter from the garden at midnight, his reflection in the bathroom mirror lingering a beat too long after he turns away. Is it grief’s cruel mimicry, or something spectral urging him to dig deeper?

Thread two plunges into the cold cases, a spiderweb of brutality linking back to Eldridge’s underbelly. Jonathan, it transpires, wasn’t just a surgeon; he moonlighted as an amateur sleuth, compiling dossiers on a string of unsolved killings – women strangled in the moors, their bodies arranged like macabre tableaux, echoes of Joel’s sister Sarah’s unsolved drowning/murder. Joel, leveraging his psych expertise, profiles the phantom killer: a narcissist with a god complex, perhaps someone in the Lazarus orbit. Collaborating with Bella and clashing with Alison, he raids dusty archives and interviews reluctant witnesses – a barmaid who swears she saw Jonathan arguing with a shadowy figure weeks before his death, a former patient ranting about “resurrections” in Jonathan’s care. Subplots simmer: Jenna’s spiraling debt threatening the house sale, Seth’s pilfering of heirlooms masking deeper deceptions, and Joel’s blackouts where he wakes with soil under his nails, as if sleepwalking to the crime scenes. Coben’s signature misdirection thrives here – every ally hides an angle, every clue a cul-de-sac – building a crescendo of dread that blurs the line between investigation and infestation.

Yet, it’s the Lazarus legacy thread that truly ensnares, excavating the family’s rotten roots. Flashbacks, rendered in desaturated hues by cinematographer Suzie Lavelle (Killing Eve), peel back the ’90s idyll: young Joel idolizing his father, Sarah’s golden-girl glow dimming under unexplained bruises, Jonathan’s late-night absences chalked up to “charity work.” Present-day Joel uncovers Jonathan’s secret study – a warren of Polaroids and voice recordings where the doctor confesses to ethical lapses: experimental therapies on trauma victims, blurring healing and harm. Themes of resurrection haunt every frame – not just the biblical nod in the title, but the undead persistence of guilt, where the dead demand justice from the living. Joel’s “disturbing experiences” escalate: visions of Sarah beckoning from the lake, Jonathan’s apparition in therapy mirrors, objects moving with poltergeist petulance. Is it psychosis, inherited like a family curse? Or proof that some sins summon the damned? Brocklehurst’s dialogue crackles with Coben-esque zingers – “The dead don’t lie; they just wait for you to catch up” – while Yip’s direction amps the horror quotient with Dutch angles and sound design that turns dripping faucets into Morse code omens.

And then, the plot twists – those Coben curveballs that hit like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus, leaving you gasping and rewinding. Without gutting the goose entirely, consider this appetizer: Midway through episode three, a “suicide” note in Jonathan’s hand reveals not despair, but a cipher – coordinates to a moorland grave unearthing not a body, but a Lazarus family Bible scrawled with confessions that recast Dad not as victim, but vigilante. Alliances shatter: Bella’s “support” veils a vendetta tied to one of the cold cases, her forensic files forged to frame Joel. Jenna’s maternal facade fractures when a DNA test links her “miracle” pregnancy to forbidden fruit from the family tree, twisting sisterly love into something serpentine. Seth? His bumbling burglary masks a blackmail ledger naming Jonathan as the killer’s enabler, not enemy. But the series’ gut-punch pivot arrives in episode five: Joel’s blackouts aren’t madness – they’re regressions, triggered by a suppressed memory where he, as a boy, witnessed Sarah’s murder… and helped cover it up, his child hands stained with alibi lies. The killer? Not a phantom, but a Lazarus by blood, resurrecting the cycle in Joel’s own psyche. The finale detonates with a lakeside showdown where past and present collide in a storm of revelations: Jonathan faked his death to bait the beast, but the true horror is Joel’s complicity, forcing a resurrection of his own – from witness to warrior, or monster reborn. It’s a Möbius strip of morality, where every “aha” loops back to “oh God, no,” cementing Lazarus as Coben’s most audacious gut-twist yet.

What makes Lazarus a must-binge isn’t just the shocks; it’s the soul. In an era of jump-scare slop, Coben and co. deliver a thriller that probes the psyche’s crypt, asking: What if the ghosts we fear most are the ones we birthed? Claflin’s Joel embodies the everyman’s unraveling – a mirror for our own buried griefs – while Nighy’s Jonathan lingers like a bad dream you can’t shake. The supporting cast elevates the ensemble to ensemble excellence: Roach’s Jenna a powder keg of pathos, Crome’s Bella a blade in the dark, Ashfield’s Alison the grounded gravity keeping the supernatural from floating free. Yip’s direction, laced with Yorkshire grit and Gothic grandeur, pairs with Theodore Shapiro’s score – those low cello drones building to shrieking strings – to craft an atmosphere thick as fog, immersive as a fever.

As October 22 looms, Lazarus arrives like a full moon over the moors: timely for spooky season, timeless in its terrors. Prime Video, fresh off Coben’s Netflix dominions, positions this as their prestige poison – a global drop in 240 territories, primed for watercooler wars and Reddit rabbit holes. Early buzz from set leaks and trailer teases (that chilling close-up of Claflin’s eyes dilating in the rain) screams sleeper hit, with whispers of Emmy nods for Claflin and Nighy. But beyond awards bait, it’s a clarion call: In Coben’s world, no one’s truly dead until the truth drags them kicking and screaming back to life. So, queue it up, dim the lights, and brace for the binge. Lazarus isn’t just a series; it’s a seance. And once you summon it, good luck putting the spirits to rest.