The prolificacy of Netflix’s adaptations of Harlan Coben novels makes it look like it’s easy to translate the author’s stories to the screen. But Coben’s novels are known for their twists, and on screen those twists can sometimes stop making sense. That’s the case with the latest adaptation, which was produced in Argentina.

Opening Shot: A teenage girl is practicing on violin. A teenage boy watches her from the window of his house.

The Gist: While she’s practicing, Martina (Carmela Rivero) gets a call from an older man; the audio is a bit garbled, but the call feels strange in nature, almost flirtatious.

In the meantime, Ema Garay (Soledad Villamil) goes to work at the offices of an online publication in the Argentinian Patagoinia city of Bariloche. She’s well-known around the region for her video series Caught, where she confronts people who have gotten away with crimes; an example we see is when she confronts a woman who committed a hit and run. Currently, she’s responding to a chat on a video game, posing as a teenager in order to catch a known predator.

Ema is trying to get the police to act on the evidence she has so far, but it’s not enough for the local chief; he requests control of the account she’s using to talk to the predator, which she refuses to hand over. She decides to go to speak to one of the predator’s previous victims, but protecting the girl and her parents is the girl’s godfather, Leo Mercer (Alberto Ammann).

She decides to flush out the predator by setting up a meet-up with a teen girl acting as a decoy. Ema and her colleagues sit in a van waiting for hours for someone to show up; a person finally does, and she chases him through the park where they are located, but she can’t get a good photo of him.

Looking for more information, Ema arranges to go to the camp for the Fronteras Foundation, which Leo runs, to talk to the kids he works with about being groomed by online predators on the game she’s been investigating. After that meeting, the two end up connecting and spend the night together.

Ema sets up a late-night meeting with the predator and is surprised to find out who it is. In the meantime, Martina goes to a party and ends up disappearing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Based on Harlan Coben’s novel Caught, the series is similar to all of the other Coben shows on Netflix, so we’ll cite the last one we reviewed, Just One Look.

Our Take: Caught was adapted by Ana Cohan and Miguel Cohan, but it exhibits the same twisting, turning story as most of the other Coben adaptations. This time around, though, the first episode seems to be deliberately murky, to the point where we’re not always clear about exactly what’s going on or what someone’s role in the drama will be going forward.

Ema is obviously shocked when she and her crew come across Leo at the designated meeting point, and it seems that the evidence against Leo is pretty strong. But his claims that he was coming to help someone and nothing else might just be true. The first episode really doesn’t give more than a hint that his relationships with young girls might be inappropriate. He gets the call when he’s at dinner with his friend Marcos (Juan Minujin), but the context of how Marcos is involved in all of this isn’t even alluded to.

We’re also not sure how Martina factors into all of this. Yes, she goes missing, and it seems that she’s already a victim of being groomed by a much older man. But she also knows Ema’s son Bruno (Matías Recalt) and is being stalked by her neighbor, so that could go in any direction.

It feels like most of the show will be about Ema’s split loyalties and her doubts about Leo’s guilt. But the first episode feels so fragmented that we’re unsure how all of these stories will feed into what Ema will be dealing with.

Sex and Skin: Any sex in the first episode is mostly implied.

Parting Shot: Martina’s mother goes into her room the next morning and sees her daughter’s bed is empty.

Sleeper Star: Carmela Rivero does a credible job of making Martina look like a classical violinist in an audition scene.

Most Pilot-y Line: It was hard to keep track of the grey-haired middle-aged men with beards and the dark-haired teenage boys in this first episode. You’d think the casting director would find more distinctive-looking actors.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Caught is a Coben adaptation that gives its twists without much in the way of setup or context, so they seem to come out of nowhere, while the presence of other people in the story remains mysterious. We’re not sure if this is the fault of the source material or an adaptation that didn’t think these things through.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.