Karen Pirie

Val McDermid adaptation hits each benchmark of a good detective thriller with the resounding thud of an assassinated key witness meeting the hard concrete ...

Hers is a deeply sympathetic character, in sharp contrast to Daniel Portman, who, as the brother of Rosie, is custodian of a deep family secret: a more menacing drunk it is hard to imagine outside the bars of Westminster. Lyle, in one scene metaphorically squashed in a lift with grey-suited blokes about twice her size, is excellent as the undervalued, underestimated officer who succeeds where the men have failed. Fortunately, there are many of them, including a trio of now successful former students who were at the centre of the case then, and arrested and questioned, but who somehow got off. There are also some questions to be asked of the family of the murdered woman, who are, to put it mildly, a wee bit strange. A detective drama should be no more frustrating to watch than a medium-level Sudoku, in my opinion, with a half-dozen suspects as a maximum and no more, no dysfunctional family more than five-strong, and a standard two gratuitous dialogue scenes that confirm what’s going on and why. It helps us to be bothered enough to make time (90 minutes a go) to watch the next episodes. The murder of the bar worker Rosie Duff (Anna Russell-Martin) in 1996 was particularly macabre. It’s not great when Pirie finds this out, but it makes her, and the viewers, determined for justice to be delivered. Can Pirie solve the case before the pesky podcaster? Yet, by contrast, and unusually for a regional detective series, there is nothing unusual or idiosyncratic about its hero. [Kate Middleton](/topic/kate-middleton). Now it’s got its very own eponymous TV detective series – [Karen Pirie](/topic/karen-pirie).