‘I Will Find You’: In Netflix’s new Boston-set mystery, a Revere dad and a former Globie search for the truth

Memories of Revere weighed heavily on Harlan Coben as he worked on his 2023 novel “I Will Find You,” now adapted into a new Netflix series which began streaming on Thursday.

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Boston is at the heart of the mystery thriller, which follows a Revere dad named David Burroughs (Sam Worthington), who’s stuck in a Maine penitentiary for the murder of his son. However, David maintains his innocence and embarks on a journey to find the truth when Rachel Mills (Britt Lower), a fictional former Boston Globe reporter and his ex-sister-in-law, visits him in prison with a photo (taken at Six Flags New England) that shows his son may still be alive.

Describing him as a “Revere Beach boy,” Coben had his late father, a Winthrop native, as well as his family from the area, in mind as he wrote “I Will Find You.”

“The last member of my family who had been in Revere had died maybe six months to a year before I started the book. I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” Coben told the Globe in a Zoom interview on Tuesday. “So all of my connections to Revere and that childhood part were gone. Maybe this was part of my way of capturing those people again.”

Though he grew up in New Jersey, Coben spent many summers as a kid in the ’60s and ’70s hanging out on the old boardwalk at Revere Beach, and wandering around streets like Constitution Ave. and Centennial Ave. He also once worked in Marshfield for Red Auerbach and the Celtics during his youth, and would later return to Massachusetts to study at Amherst College.

“Boston, that area, has been a big part of my life,” said Coben, noting how he wanted to tap into the “nostalgia feel of Revere” for the character of David. “I just thought it’d be a cool place for him to come from, this family and that neighborhood feel, the row house sort of thing. I wanted that place to set this story.”

Known for his work as the star of James Cameron’s “Avatar” movies, Worthington calls his take on David in the Netflix adaptation of “I Will Find You” more of a “damsel in distress.” He relies on the help of Lower’s Rachel while looking into the whereabouts of his son, as well as the powerful and shadowy figures responsible for setting David up.

“I wanted to play him in a way where he was always the one that needed to be rescued, and he was the one that was in trouble all the time and maybe not making the best decisions,” said Worthington, explaining how the story subverts the usual dynamics for a lead character in a thriller. “It allows me a bit more of a raw performance.”

“We didn’t want him to be a classic action hero,” said Coben, who also serves as an executive producer on the show. “I didn’t want him swinging off a bridge and then kicking somebody in the head and doing all of those sort of things, and Sam didn’t want that either.”

And while “I Will Find You” filmed primarily in Canada, Worthington didn’t have much trouble finding his inner Bostonian, noting the kinship between the Hub and his home of Australia.

“I think Australians and Bostonians have a lot of similarities in how we approach things,” said Worthington. “Sometimes maybe a bit too headstrong, definitely blunt and honest.”

Worthington relied on costar Jonathan Tucker, a Boston native, to help him embrace what it meant to be from the city.

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“He’s a born and bred, bleeds green kind of Bostonian,” Worthington said of Tucker, who plays David’s close pal and BPD Sergeant Adam Mackenzie on the show. “His basic note to me was, ‘You got to get that spirit, that’s what it’s about. That grit, that resilience, that tenacity, you got to get that into your blood.’”

“To me, he was always the benchmark, if the scene didn’t feel authentic in a Bostonian way,” he added. “And it’s about family, and family is important to Boston. It just is. That’s its beating heart, how everybody interacts with each other up there and the community spirit.”

Echoing Worthington, Lower said that she and the “I Will Find You” team channeled the city’s strength and resilience, “tapping into the Boston Strong” ethos. Known for her Emmy-winning role on Apple TV’s “Severance,” Lower plays Rachel, a veteran journalist who was fired from the Globe after a past assignment took a tragic turn.

“I thought of Rachel as this old soul,” said Lower. “The prop department and I packed her bag with a 35 millimeter camera and a handheld recorder and a notebook. This is like an analog person in a digital world.”

Now teaching at Quincy College, Rachel hasn’t lost her fire for finding the truth, and she’s the spark behind the search for David’s son, going so far as to help the distraught dad as he’s on the lam after breaking out of prison.

“She’s just really hands on, but she hasn’t been able to do what she loves for a long time,” she added. “While teaching is great, it’s not the same as being inside of a story. And what was interesting to me is that it flips the script, and she’s actually now directly inside of the story, alongside a fugitive who she’s breaking the law with.”

A master of pulse-pounding page turners, Coben has built a career out of captivating readers with his twist-filled thrillers, and is no stranger to writing characters with Boston ties (his Myron Bolitar series centers around a former Celtics player). Coben credits his time at Amherst and being surrounded by so much talent there for fostering his love of writing.

“I lived next door to David Foster Wallace my freshman year. Dan Brown was in my fraternity,” said Coben, who also shouted out classmates like Chris Bohjalian, Susannah Grant, and Bill Amend. “These people were all my class at Amherst College, and so there was something in the water there that maybe helped us all want to tell stories in the end.”

Praising Coben’s penchant for “twists and turns,” Worthington explained that, while the author’s works are like puzzles, filled with red herrings and misdirections, it’s the core theme of family that resonates with audiences.

“Harlan’s his own genre,” said Worthington. “At the center they’re always about an ordinary family who just happened to be in an extraordinary kind of circumstance, and I think that’s what we connect with.”

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“I Will Find You” is now streaming on Netflix.