It's 2026 and the bullies have taken over the school, but justice is still being done on television. For whatever psychological reasons I am not equipped to explain, this usually involves murder. And so we begin the new year in a flurry of mysteries.

The name of internationally bestselling mystery machine Harlan Coben is attached to two of these, one fiction, one non. Coben himself appears as the onscreen host of "Harlan Coben's Final Twist," a documentary true-crime series, which began Wednesday on CBS (it also streams on Paramount+). Like his dozens of novels — the latest a collaboration with Reese Witherspoon — it involves a, wait for it, final twist, though as a writer he'd never create characters so unglamorous. The first episode, "Billy & Billie Jean," details a 2012 double homicide in Mountain City, Tennessee, made unusual by a string of unpredictable deceptions and manipulations; I won't go into detail, but it's weird.

People eat these shows like candy, and while candy can rot your teeth and put on pounds, it can also deliver a jolt of guilty pleasure and feed a sugar addiction. As far as I can tell, not being a connoisseur of the genre but having some experience of it, "Final Twist" is pretty much a Thing of Its Kind, not substantially different from "Dateline" or "48 Hours," and with those words you may already know if you'll like it. For me, the best thing about such shows are the (honest) detectives and (capable) lawyers happy to talk about an old, successfully concluded case, and how little any of it resembles what crime fiction throws at you.

"Harlan Coben's Run Away," now streaming from Netflix, which has a multimillion-dollar, five-year deal to adapt Coben novels — this one from 2019 — concerns a father looking for his daughter (like "Taken," I hear you say). As in the previous Netflix productions "Harlan Coben's Missing You," "Harlan Coben's Stay Close" and "Harlan Coben's Fool Me Once," the location has been shifted from the United States to the north of England, which has the paradoxical quality of seeming more realistic just by being less familiar. (The Netflix deal has also produced Coben series in Spain, Poland and France, available to watch domestically as well.)

Three flavors of investigators combine here: the citizen detective, the private detective and the police detective. The first is Simon Greene (James Nesbitt, who also starred, as a different character, in 2021's "Stay Close"), whose daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange) went off to university and got addicted to heroin; when the person he believes to be her dealer/boyfriend winds up messily dead, Simon — earlier caught beating him up on video — becomes a prime suspect. (His quick temper does him no favors.) A well-to-do worker in finance, he is ready to spread a lot of money around, and make some dodgy connections, to find her.

Second is private investigator Elena Ravenscroft (Ruth Jones), working on a different missing child case, for a different father. (Annette Badland, the medical examiner on "Midsomer Murders," plays her tech genius, Lou.) And third are Mutt and Jeff police detectives Isaac Fagbenle (Alfred Enoch) and Ruby Todd (Amy Gledhill), looking into that murder and a string of killings with no apparent connection, some of which we'll see committed by good-looking young psychos Dee Dee (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) and Ash (Jon Pointing), not just for cheap thrills. All these threads, obviously, are bound for a single knot.

Also in the mix are wife Ingrid (Minnie Driver), a doctor who will spend a chunk of the series in a medically induced coma; their other children, Sam (Adrian Greensmith), also away at school, and younger daughter Anya (Ellie Henry); and James' sister-in-law and business partner Yvonne (Ingrid Oliver). Lucian Msamati plays Cornelius, a sort of guardian angel for Paige, his sometime neighbor.

Nesbitt, overheated, paranoid, jealous — it can become as tiring to the viewer as it is to the people around him — will get many things wrong before anyone sets him right. This is, of course, a regular feature of mysteries or else they'd all be over in five minutes, but there is an especially high level of mistakenness and misdirection here. The Big Idea at the bottom of it is novel enough, but even though it has real-world precedents, it does inch across the line between clever and goofy. (There's a cult.) The solution that might have come to your mind along the way will have slipped it by the time the show, with more twists than a complete set of Chubby Checker LPs, gets around to confirming it. The ending, naturally, will surprise you; it certainly does Simon.

There are many good performances, but I was especially fond of Jones (co-creator and co-star, with James Corden, of the much-loved "Gavin & Stacey"), whose no-nonsense shamus could support a show of her own, and Gledhill, as the only character allowed to display any sort of cheeriness — a necessary leavening agent over eight dark episodes.

Contrariwise, "His & Hers," which premiered Thursday, also on Netflix, from a novel by U.K. author Alice Feeney, has been transatlantically transplanted to a small town a drive away from Atlanta (Feeney, who has written eight novels since 2018, is seemingly on track to be another Coben, who blurbs her.) Compared with the naturalistic "Run Away," calmly rendered apart from Simon's sweaty outbursts, it's something of a high-volume potboiler, including a smattering of (demurely pictured) sex, mostly of the hot and meaningless variety.

Jon Bernthal plays Det. Jack Harper, back working in his hometown after flaming out elsewhere, living as the responsible adult with an adorable little niece and her depressed, alcoholic mother, Zoe (Marin Ireland). ("Vodka's cheaper than Ambien," says Zoe.) He has a mother-in-law, Alice (Crystal Fox), who may be losing her memory and upon whom he helpfully visits, and a smart new partner, Priya (Sunita Mani), whom he calls "Boston," in the way characters in fiction often nickname people by where they come from.

Tessa Thompson plays Anna Andrews, a former Atlanta anchorwoman looking to reclaim her chair after a year away, currently occupied by blond Lexy (rhymes with sexy) Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse). (Anna, who is Black, asks her boss, who isn't, "How do you suddenly make that woman the face of the station ... in Atlanta?") Unable to talk herself back into her old job, she gets herself dispatched as a field reporter to cover a murder in what happens to be her old hometown. It happens also to be that of her estranged husband, who happens to be Det. Harper, with whom she happens to share a family trauma.

She also happens to know the victim — as does Jack — the wife of a local, older rich man (Chris Bauer), a stock character in these things. And the cameraman she brings with her, Richard (Pablo Schreiber), just so happens to be married to Lexy. (So much happenstance.) She's a story-first, people-second kind of reporter — you know the type — but Feeney, who worked as a producer and journalist at the BBC for many years, is at least not working from a position of ignorance.

The series begins with lines from the novel: "There are at least two sides to every story. Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying." This isn't true — one can be wrong without lying, and memory is malleable. But in the motion pictures, however many viewpoints and untruths and red herrings are thrown at you, and however much the characters disagree, there's usually just one side in the end — the "facts" that have played out onscreen. Feeney's book features multiple narrators, but relativity is not an idea the series bothers to develop. (It isn't "Rashomon.") Still, these people do lie — a lot — which serves them no better than it did Pinocchio.

As more murders pile up, seemingly targeting Anna's old high school clique, emotions run high all around. Jack is so blustery, so loudly and quickly dismissive of Priya's good ideas, that the phrase "doth protest too much" springs to mind. (As does, "Simmer down, Jon Bernthal.") Some clues planted along the way may lead a viewer to the correct solution — I am not one of them — which is oddly similar to that of "Run Away." Both series also end around a dinner table. Coincidence, it's everywhere.

Most to my taste is "Bookish," an episodic British import beginning Sunday on PBS. Created by and starring Mark Gatiss, a many-credited writer and actor, with roots in British comedy, sci-fi and mystery — with Steven Moffat, he co-created "Sherlock," in which he played Mycroft Holmes, and is the author of nine "Doctor Who" screenplays. It's a traditional sort of U.K. series, a well-dressed postwar period piece with an eccentric detective at its center. Gatiss plays Gabriel Book, an antiquarian bookseller with a "hobby" in crime-solving, joining the ranks of consulting and amateur sleuths so dear to British crime fiction — Marple, Wimsey, Holmes, Paul Temple, Father Brown, et al.

Soft-spoken, kindly and literary — lots of quotations are worked into his dialogue — he has gathered a little crew around him: a wife named Trottie (Polly Walker, who contributed to the writing), who runs a wallpaper shop adjacent to his bookstore on a cobblestone London lane; a dog called Dog; Nora (Buket Kömür), a girl from across the lane who hangs out and helps out; and a new assistant, Jack (Connor Finch), arriving fresh from prison with no idea why he's been summoned there. (He quickly proves right for the job, in and out of the store.) Book also has a refreshingly friendly relationship with Scotland Yard inspector Bliss (Elliot Levey) and the authority of a never-shown "letter from Churchill" that allows him free access to crime scenes, to the evident displeasure of uniformed Sgt. Morris (Blake Harrison). (There may be more behind this enmity.) The production is naturalistic, with bits of expressionist neo-noir worked in when a crime is being described.

Like the best, by which I mean my favorite such series, it's humorous and fun, while also being human and sad. Personal business among the principals develops over the course of the season's three stories (each presented in two episodes); a second series has already been ordered, thanks much.

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'HARLAN COBEN’S FINAL TWIST'

Rating: TV-14

How to watch: Wednesdays on CBS (and streaming on Paramount+)

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'RUN AWAY'

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Netflix

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'HIS & HERS'

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Netflix

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'BOOKISH'

Rating: TV-14

How to watch: Premieres Jan. 11 on PBS

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