Beside the Syrian Sea is a debut novel and a contemporary spy thriller set in and around Beirut. These days, reading classic spy novels of the “British intelligence during the Cold War” variety gives us a comforting distance from reality. The Cold War was a long time ago. It can seem almost quaint now. Beside…
DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) has a hunch that at least three of the four suspects in the investigation of David Walker’s murder are acquainted with each other. Yet, she can’t figure out how they’re acquainted. So she plans to bring them all together and watch what happens. It’s a good plan. We know it’s…
David Walker is dead; murdered in 1990, his body is found folded up inside a suitcase recently dredged up from a river. DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) are on the case, and it hasn’t taken them long to narrow the field to a handful of suspects. First is David…
“Sex, death, and revenge: Here are three of our main topics.” In this instance, teacher Sara Mahmoud (Badria Timimi) is talking about Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but she could just as easily be talking about Series 2 of Unforgotten on Masterpiece Mystery. For where would the world of crime drama be without sex, death, and revenge? Not…
Each episode of Unforgotten on Masterpiece Mystery can be summed up in a single line of dialog. For Episode 3, it would be: “This is who we are now.” The generation of characters who would have been small children or not even born when Jimmy Sullivan was murdered are now adults whose lives have been…
Happy-go-lucky teenager Jimmy Sullivan is the unlikely linchpin that links a cast of disparate characters in Unforgotten on Masterpiece Mystery. As the investigation into Jimmy’s murder continues, each new development threatens to destroy the lives of those involved. Start with Lizzie Wilton (Ruth Sheen), or Beth Laws as she once was known. Her life isn’t…
The BBC America marketing department knew what they were doing when they tacked a sneak preview of Killing Eve onto an Orphan Black retrospective highlight show a couple of weeks ago. My DVR, set to record anything related to Orphan Black, recorded this. Boy, am I glad. Killing Eve seems poised to fill the empty…
“Is a crime less serious because time has passed? Is a wrong less wrong because it was done 50 years ago? Or 60? Or 70?” That, in so many words, is the motivation behind Unforgotten, a cold-case police procedural now airing on Masterpiece Mystery. The premise is nothing new; we’ve seen, read, and heard cold-case…
Five years before this episode takes place, a car headed toward the country village of Bramford was forced off the road by a military vehicle barreling toward it. The truck didn’t slow down. The car wound up in a ditch, and there was no sign of life from its occupants—a professorial-looking fellow and the scruffy…
In the Fosdick ward at Cowley General Hospital, the beds are numbered 1 through 10. They look alike, but Bed 10 is different from the others. People die in Bed 10. In fact, the hospital staff is tying on a toe tag and carting an unfortunate patient away as this episode opens. “Bed 10’s unlucky,”…
