Harlan Coben's Lazarus Episode 04 Recap: Joel Makes Billy the New Suspect
What happens — the short version (spoilers)
- Jenna admits she kissed Billy at the dance, that Sutton saw them and left, and that she later found Sutton's body and washed her hands before police arrived.
- Margot MacIntyre appears to Joel as a ghost warning that her son Billy has turned dark and been lurking around Jonathan's office.
- Joel goes to the police certain Billy is the killer, but Brown points out that Billy is connected to every suspicious death, and so is Joel.
- Billy is arrested after bringing men to attack Sam Olsen in the woods, and Margot is found stabbed to death, clearing Joel since Brown had been tailing him.
- Joel realizes Billy spiked Jenna's drink that night, and then spots that Sam Olsen had Sutton's stuffed dog, which was still in her room on the night she died.
Harlan Coben’s Lazarus, Season 1, Episode 04 Prime Video · 2025
Jenna remembers more of Sutton’s last night, while Margot’s death leaves Joel explaining things nobody can verify.
By Episode 04, Joel Lazarus (Sam Claflin) has stopped receiving ghostly clues as private shocks. They now put him in rooms with living people who can lose jobs, trust, freedom, or family. Jenna Lazarus (Alexandra Roach) tells him what she remembers from the night Sutton died, Margot MacIntyre appears to him with a warning about Billy, and Seth McGovern (David Fynn) finally says the thing Joel has been dodging: from the outside, Joel looks suspicious too.
Joel gets closer to Billy MacIntyre as a suspect, but each step also makes Joel look less stable to everyone else. The ghost story is real. The police problem is real too.
Jenna admits she kissed Billy and found Sutton dead
Joel begins by pushing Jenna on the night Sutton died. He knows she lied. Jenna tries to stall, then breaks. She kissed Billy at the dance. Sutton saw them. That was why Sutton left.
Jenna’s memory is not clean. She says she was drunk, that she blacked out, that the night comes back in pieces. What she does remember is Sutton catching her with Billy and the look on Sutton’s face. Joel is furious because Jenna’s secret did not only hide a teenage betrayal. It let him blame himself for years because he stayed behind with Bella instead of following Sutton home.
Then Jenna gives him a worse detail. She must have followed Sutton home after the dance. She was in her room when Joel screamed. When she came out, Joel had already gone to get their father, and Jenna saw Sutton on the floor. “There was so much blood,” she says. She also remembers going out for help, coming back, and realising she had washed her hands before the police arrived.
Joel cannot stay in the room with her. Jenna says she is sorry, but the apology arrives after twenty-five years of silence. Jenna was a frightened child near a murder scene, and Joel is still right to feel robbed of the truth.
Margot warns Joel about Billy from Jonathan’s office
Joel takes the anger to Seth, who tries to give Jenna a little grace. Seth says people sometimes need to tell themselves a story when the truth does not feel real. Joel hears that as a posh defence of lying.
The conversation matters because Seth is still trying to hold Joel together as a friend, not as a police officer. He jokes about having “hidden profundity,” then gets out before Joel can fully explain the woman he has spotted across the bar. Joel has seen Margot MacIntyre.
Margot is dead by the time she appears in Jonathan Lazarus’s old office, but Joel does not know that yet. She talks to him as if he is Jonathan, calls him Dr L, and says there is a real problem with Billy. Her son has been hanging around the building, in the corridors and toilets, waiting and watching Jonathan’s patients. He stole her pass to get in. Margot says Billy has become dark, then promises she will not let anyone get hurt.
Joel tries to reach the living Margot and gets her voicemail. He goes to her house, finds broken glass, and breaks in. A cat startles him, then Aidan turns up because he saw Joel and wanted to hang out. Aidan’s presence is awkward and sad. He wants time with Joel without yet saying why.
The police side catches up fast. McClusky has found a body believed to be Neil Croft behind a wall, dead for two or three decades, with blunt force trauma to the head. Seth is rattled by that discovery when Joel arrives at the station saying he thinks Billy may have murdered Jonathan.
DCI Alison Brown (Kate Ashfield) listens, but she is not swept along by Joel’s certainty. Joel can connect Billy to Sutton because Billy was Sutton’s boyfriend. He can connect Billy to Cassandra Rhodes only by saying Cassandra was Jonathan’s patient and Billy was hanging around the office. Joel says Sutton was planning to end things with Billy, and that Billy might have killed Jonathan if Jonathan was asking questions.
Brown gives Joel the line that defines the chapter: Billy has a connection to all the suspicious deaths, but so does Joel.
Seth warns Joel that he has made himself look guilty
Seth’s patience cracks after Joel leaves voice messages saying Margot might be dead, then tells Brown his Billy theory. He spells out the danger. If Margot turns up dead and Joel’s messages line up with her time of death, Seth is holding evidence that could either hurt Joel or destroy Seth’s own life if he hides it.
That is the friendliest version of the warning. The colder version is worse: Joel looks like a man who unravelled after his father’s death, killed Margot, and tried to point the police at Billy before her body was found.
He also gives Joel another blow about Sutton’s night. Joel has been angry at Jenna for twisting facts, but Seth says Joel has done the same thing for years. Joel stayed behind at the dance, and it was not to comfort Bella.
The subtitles then jump ahead to the public search for Margot, with her family saying her disappearance is out of character. The woods sequence pulls all of Joel’s suspects and wounds into one place. Joel hears Margot’s warning again in fragments: Billy has a problem, Sutton was going to break up with him, and someone wanted to hurt her. He finds Margot’s dog, Teddy, and follows sounds in the trees.
For a moment, it seems as if Billy is hiding nearby. Instead, Billy has brought men to attack Sam Olsen, the man long suspected by locals of killing Sutton. Billy shouts “Olsen, you murderer!” and demands to know where his mother is. Joel steps in and gets hurt.
Afterward, Billy is arrested for assault and incitement to commit violence. Sam ends up in hospital overnight, bruised but almost resigned to it. He says he is used to this kind of suspicion. When Joel asks why Sam was in the woods, Sam says he heard about the search while he was on his way out of the city to fish for Arctic char.
It is an odd answer, but it fits Sam’s lonely rhythm. He thanks Joel for helping him. Joel leaves with another piece of doubt.
Aidan tells Joel about the DNA test
Aidan is waiting by Joel’s car. He has taken Joel’s toothbrush and done a DNA test. The result is positive. Joel is his father.
Joel’s first reaction is shock, then an attempt to be careful with a boy who has already had to find this out on his own. He says he did not know. Aidan says he feels different, as if he does not belong, and thought knowing where he came from might help.
Joel does not try to force instant fatherhood. He offers presence. When Aidan asks whether Joel would have been around if he had known, Joel gives him the one answer he can stand behind: if he had held Aidan as a baby and known he was his, nothing would have dragged him away.
Joel later goes to Laura, the woman who first came to Jonathan’s practice. He admits he planned to ask her out, then realised he needs a therapist. He has found two dead bodies in a few days, but the bigger wound is still Sutton. His relationships keep circling Bella, even though he and Bella were not happy together.
Laura’s answer is blunt and useful. Bella belongs to a time when Sutton was alive. That is why the attachment feels right even when it is not.
Then Seth calls Joel to the station. Margot has been found. She was stabbed in the chest with an oddly shaped serrated knife, and her body was not moved far after the murder. Brown reads that as premeditated: someone brought the knife into the woods. She also corrects Billy’s lie. He was not in the Caribbean when Jonathan died. He was in rehab.
Brown still does not know how Joel knew Margot was dead, but she knows he did not kill her because she has been tailing him. Seth, finally, asks Joel for the truth. Joel says he saw Margot as a ghost. Seth admits he never believed him. He thought grief, trauma, sleep loss, medication, or old memories might explain it. Margot’s death has broken those answers.
Joel’s answer does not move: “It’s real.”
The final family repair comes from Billy’s rehab referral. Jonathan wrote the original letter more than twenty years ago because Billy had been stealing temazepam from his office and had an addiction to benzodiazepines. Joel takes that to Jenna and tells her Billy likely spiked her drink on the night of the dance. He used her to make Sutton jealous.
Jenna remembers Billy giving her a drink. Joel tells her the drug would explain the blackout, the speed of her impairment, and why she had little or no control. It does not erase Jenna’s silence, and Jenna knows that. But it gives her back one thing Billy stole from her: the belief that she chose all of it.
Then Joel sees an old video of Sutton’s bedroom and notices the stuffed dog Sam Olsen claimed Sutton gave him as a child. The toy was still in Sutton’s room on the night she died. Sam could not have received it years earlier. He must have taken it from her room when she was murdered.
Billy looks dangerous. Sam suddenly looks worse.
What works
- Jenna’s confession has real damage on both sides. She was a child carrying terror and shame, but Joel’s anger still makes sense.
- Seth’s confrontation uses the police/friend overlap well. He loves Joel enough to warn him, and knows the evidence well enough to be scared.
- Aidan’s paternity reveal lands quietly. Joel’s answer to him is the rare warm moment that does not feel false.
- The Billy material gains weight because the temazepam detail explains Jenna’s fragmented memory without letting Billy become the only possible answer.
What stumbles
- The missing stretch in the subtitle flow before the search makes the move from Seth’s warning to the woods feel a little abrupt on the page.
- Brown tailing Joel is useful for clearing him, but it arrives very neatly after a long run of suspicion.
- Laura’s therapist turn is strong for Joel’s grief, though her presence still feels convenient given how many roles she fills in two meetings.
What this sets up for Episode 05
Margot’s murder has forced Seth closer to accepting that Joel is seeing real ghosts, even if he is not ready to say it cleanly. Billy is now tied to Jonathan’s office, old drug thefts, rehab, Jenna’s blackout, and violent grief over Margot. But the stuffed dog puts Sam Olsen back near Sutton’s bedroom in a way his old story cannot survive.
Rating: 7.4/10
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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.