Lady in the Lake is a 2024 Apple TV+ limited series created and directed by Alma Har'el and adapted from Laura Lippman's acclaimed novel. Set in 1960s Baltimore, it is a period mystery that braids together two women's lives across the city's sharp lines of race and class.
Natalie Portman stars as Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who abandons her stifling marriage to reinvent herself as an investigative newspaper reporter and becomes fixated on an unsolved death. Moses Ingram plays Cleo Johnson, a Black woman navigating Baltimore's political and nightlife worlds, whose fate becomes entangled with Maddie's pursuit of a story. The series uses the two women's parallel narration to interrogate ambition, visibility, and who gets to tell whose story.
The series marked a high-profile move into television for Portman and drew attention for Har'el's dreamlike, stylistically bold direction and its evocative recreation of mid-century Baltimore. Critics praised the central performances and the show's ambition even as they debated its hallucinatory, non-linear structure. It streams on Apple TV+.
The Survivors is an Australian Netflix limited series adapted by Tony Ayres from Jane Harper's 2020 novel, a moody mystery from the author of The Dry. Set in the fictional Tasmanian coastal town of Evelyn Bay, the six-part drama moves between past and present to unpack how a single catastrophic day continues to shape a small community fifteen years later.
Charlie Vickers stars as Kieran Elliott, who returns home with his young family carrying guilt over a long-ago storm that killed three people, including his brother. When the body of a young woman is discovered on the beach soon after his arrival, old suspicions and buried secrets come roaring back, and the town's fragile peace begins to fracture. Yerin Ha plays Kieran's partner Mia, with Robyn Malcolm and Damien Garvey among the ensemble.
Premiering in June 2025, The Survivors became a major hit for Netflix, reaching the number-two spot on the platform's global chart in its first week and earning a perfect critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. Atmospheric and grief-soaked, it confirmed Jane Harper's crime fiction as fertile ground for prestige television. It streams on Netflix.
We Were Liars is a Prime Video adaptation of E. Lockhart's 2014 young-adult bestseller, developed for television by Julie Plec and Carina Adly Mackenzie of The Vampire Diaries. Faithful to the novel's dreamy, unreliable narration, the eight-episode series unfolds as both a lush summer romance and a slow-tightening psychological mystery about a family with everything to hide.
Emily Alyn Lind stars as Cadence Sinclair, the eldest grandchild of a wealthy New England dynasty that decamps each summer to its own private island. Cadence, her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and the outsider Gat call themselves the Liars, and after a mysterious accident leaves Cadence with amnesia, she spends the following year desperate to remember what really happened during Summer 16. David Morse, Mamie Gummer, Caitlin FitzGerald and Candice King anchor the adult cast as the scheming Sinclair elders.
Premiering in June 2025, the series climbed to number one on Prime Video's charts and earned generally favorable reviews for its juicy family dynamics and its handling of the book's famous gut-punch of a twist. Prime Video renewed it for a second season, drawing on Lockhart's prequel novel Family of Liars. It streams on Prime Video.
Grosse Pointe Garden Society is a soapy dark-comedy mystery created by Jenna Bans and Bill Krebs for NBC. Set in an affluent Michigan suburb, it follows four members of a local gardening club who become bound together by a shared, deadly secret, unfolding its story across two timelines that gradually reveal how ordinary neighbors ended up burying a body among the flower beds.
Melissa Fumero, Aja Naomi King, Ben Rappaport, and AnnaSophia Robb lead the ensemble as the mismatched club members whose tangled personal lives — infidelity, custody battles, ambition, and reinvention — collide with a murder they must conspire to conceal. The series toggles between the crime's aftermath and the months leading up to it, doling out clues and misdirection while mining sharp comedy from the manicured hypocrisies of suburban life.
Premiering on NBC in February 2025, the series drew a solid response for its game cast and twisty structure, offering a glossy, bingeable blend of whodunit and domestic satire in the tradition of Desperate Housewives. Its single season delivered a self-contained mystery that rewarded attentive viewers. It streams on Peacock.
Run Away is a Netflix mystery thriller adapted from Harlan Coben's 2019 novel, the latest in the best-selling author's sweeping multi-series partnership with the streamer. Made by the team behind the hit Coben adaptation Fool Me Once, it transplants the story to the United Kingdom and unspools as a twist-laden limited series in the tradition that has made Coben a global Netflix mainstay.
James Nesbitt stars as a father whose comfortable family life shatters when his estranged, troubled daughter vanishes into a dangerous world. His desperate search to bring her home drags him into a web of secrets, violence, and buried family history. Minnie Driver, Ruth Jones, and Alfred Enoch co-star in an ensemble that keeps the show's loyalties and truths in constant doubt.
Released at the start of 2026, Run Away became an immediate phenomenon, shooting to number one on Netflix around the world in its first days and briefly toppling the platform's biggest titles. Its propulsive, cliff-hanger-driven storytelling exemplified the addictive formula that has turned Coben's adaptations into reliable streaming juggernauts. Run Away streams on Netflix.
Down Cemetery Road is an Apple TV+ mystery-thriller adapted from the 2003 debut novel by Mick Herron, the author who would later become a sensation with his Slow Horses spy series. Emma Thompson stars as Zoë Boehm, a prickly, formidable private investigator, opposite Ruth Wilson as Sarah Tucker, an Oxford housewife whose comfortable life is upended when a house on her street explodes and a little girl vanishes in the aftermath. Convinced the authorities are hiding the truth, Sarah begins digging — and pulls both women into a lethal government conspiracy.
Adapted by Morwenna Banks and carrying the same wit, paranoia, and distrust of institutions that define Herron's work, the series pairs its two leads in a slow-burning investigation that steadily widens from a single tragedy into something far more sinister. Thompson is caustic and commanding as the world-weary Boehm, while Wilson charts Sarah's transformation from bored suburbanite to obsessive amateur sleuth, and the mismatched duo's crackling dynamic drives the show.
Drawing inevitable comparisons to the hit Slow Horses — also based on Herron's novels — the series was praised for its performances and its blend of dark comedy and conspiracy thriller. Apple renewed it for a second season, confirming appetite for more of Herron's Oxford-set mysteries. It streams on Apple TV+.
Dept. Q is a Netflix crime drama created by Scott Frank, the writer-director behind The Queen's Gambit and Godless, adapting the best-selling Department Q novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. In a canny twist on the Nordic-noir source material, Frank relocates the action from Copenhagen to a wintry, gothic Edinburgh, using the Scottish city's shadowed closes and grey stone as an atmospheric backdrop for a story about buried guilt and colder cases. The result is a prestige procedural with literary polish and a distinctly bleak sense of humor.
Matthew Goode stars as DCI Carl Morck, a brilliant but abrasive detective whose arrogance has alienated nearly everyone around him. After a shooting leaves one colleague dead and another paralyzed, a guilt-ridden and unwanted Morck is exiled to the basement to run Department Q, a newly created cold-case unit that is really a public-relations gesture. There, with an unlikely team including the enigmatic Akram (Alexej Manvelov), he reopens the disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a case everyone else has given up on. Kelly Macdonald, Kate Dickie, and Leah Byrne round out the ensemble.
Critics embraced the series as one of the year's most satisfying crime dramas, praising Goode's prickly, against-type lead performance and Frank's patient, character-first storytelling. It became a hit for Netflix and was renewed for a second season within months of its debut, confirming appetite for more of Morck's gloomy, meticulous detective work. It streams on Netflix.
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is the compulsive young-adult crime thriller that took the world by storm, adapted from Holly Jackson's beloved bestselling novel and brought to stunning life as a limited series. Emma Myers stars as Pip Fitz-Amobi, a determined and fiercely intelligent teenager who chooses a five-year-old local murder case as her senior school project, convinced that the supposed killer — a teenage boy who also died — was actually innocent. As Pip digs deeper, she uncovers layers of small-town lies, buried secrets, and genuine danger that make it increasingly clear the case was never as closed as everyone insisted. The series captures the addictive quality of Jackson's prose with exceptional fidelity, delivering a thriller that respects its young audience's intelligence while delivering genuine suspense at every turn.
