Review: Want to solve a mystery this winter? Four new series will test your sleuthing skills

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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, Tenn., 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 ...