1997 police procedural audio in four parts, by Nick Fisher. Someone is
poisoned in the Reading Room of the British Library, and someone else
is mummified; Detective Superintendent Julie Enfield investigates.
Again, Imelda Staunton is the reason to listen here; the plot
goes along quite well, then (just as last time) takes a completely
unheralded sharp turn in the final episode which smacks more of
writerly desperation than of something that was intended.
And there's a more general problem, in that someone who's mad enough
to be the sort of artistic serial killer featured on cop shows really
shouldn't also be able to act sane enough to seem perfectly normal in
a group of suspects, in order to keep everything in play. But that's
certainly not a problem unique to this series, and the fixes (mostly,
keeping the killer off-stage and making the story about tracking them
down rather than about picking them from the existing characters)
substantially change the shape of the narrative.
While in Terminus Enfield's father was generically ageing, crippled
and irascible, here he's much more generally competent, and every
episode has cuts to him on a holiday trip… which seems like a bit of a
waste of the character, really, even if he does have some significance
in the final episode. Particularly since another subplot, Enfield
cautiously getting involved with someone met during the case, suffers
from cliché: the rules say that it can't end well because the iconic
character is a Single Female Tough Cop, so generally this kind of
thing ends with the potential partner turning out to be either a
victim or a killer. Here he's still around at the end without any
particular resolution.
It's all right, and I enjoyed it, but as with Terminus I'd say it's
not worth seeking out.
Freely available for the moment via
iPlayer.
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