In 2019, Laura is married to a much older man, but she and Pawel discover that they still love each other. In 2019, after the death of his wife, Pawel reunited with Laura, now a lecturer played by Agnieszka Grochowska. In 1994, young Pawel had been in love with Laura Goldsztajn, the teenage daughter of the Jewish school principal who ran the summer camp where Kamila disappeared. He left the series jobless and alone, with a question mark over his future career. Pawel, being a decent sort, prosecuted the guilty party, shouldered the blame for the financial fraud, promised to pay back the charity’s money lost to fraud, and resigned so that his workplace wouldn’t be tainted by scandalous association. The powerful father of a young rapist that Pawel was prosecuting had used an intermediary to entrap the sister-in-law as an attempt to blackmail Pawel into lifting the charges. Its story is told over two main timelines, one in 2019 when Pawel is a successful legal prosecutor and the widowed single father to young daughter Kaja, and one in 1994, when he and Kamila are teenagers.īy the end of The Woods, Pawel has made the difficult decision to resign from his prosecutor job after his sister-in-law is caught up in a fraudulent scheme to do with the charity she runs in memory of Pawel’s wife, who died of cancer. That series revolved around the murder of two teens and the disappearance of two others – including Pawel’s sister Kamila – at a summer camp during the nineties. Pawel and Kaja’s inclusion in Hold Tight continues his story and also offers a few answers to The Woods’ elliptical ending. His teenage daughter Kaja is the girlfriend of the boy who goes missing in Hold Tight’s first episode.

Pawel is adapted from the original US character of Paul Copeland and appears in Hold Tight as a member of the supporting cast. Netflix’s two Polish Harlan Coben series – 2020’s The Woods and 2022’s Hold Tight, adapted from the 20 novels of the same names – both feature the character of Pawel Kopinski (Grzegorz Damiecki), the lead in The Woods. The plots are standalone and aside from the odd cameo, the characters don’t as a rule cross over from one story to the next.

Though Harlan Coben thrillers generally take place in the same recognisably middle class world of Range Rovers, gated communities and marble kitchen islands, his inter-connected Myron Bolitar series excluded, they’re not set in a shared fictional universe.

Warning: contains spoilers for Harlan Coben’s The Woods on Netflix.

Hold tight harlan coben netflix