The actual history behind the Netflix mini-series “Unbelievable” is a near-perfect example of the Faustian bargain at the heart of true-crime storytelling. It’s horrifying and in equal measure exciting, in a way that is likely to l eave you both appalled and satisfied by the end.

The story, involving a series of rapes in Washington and Colorado from 2008 to 2011, was told by T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project in a 2015 article that won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. S o it’s not surprising that the creators of “Unbelievable” — Susannah Grant, the “Erin Brockovich” screenwriter, and the married novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman — have used it as a template for their fictional telling.

“Unbelievable” adopts the two-track structure of the original article, moving back and forth between the sad and enraging story of Marie ( Kaitlyn Dever ) — a Washington 18-year-old who, under pressure from the police, recants her report of being raped — and a pulsing account of an investigation into a series of sexual assaults three years later in Colorado.

The links among the Colorado cases are discovered through stranger-than-fiction luck and the dogged work of two female detectives played by Merritt Wever and Toni Collette . We can see that the new attacks are connected to the rape of Marie (and therefore absorb the implicit lesson that solving her case would have prevented them) and spend the series’ eight episodes in anticipation that someone onscreen will see it too.