Product Review

Multi-award-winner Brenda Blethyn (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) plays the maverick but brilliant Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope in this mystery series based on Ann Cleeves’s bestselling crime fiction. From the streets of Newcastle to remote rural Northumberland, Stanhope tackles cases as diverse and wild as their settings: a deadly blaze at a vacation park on the windswept North Sea coast, the 30-year-old disappearance of a schoolgirl from a mining town, a corpse decomposing in a farm’s slurry tank, and the suspicious death of a family man in a multistory parking lot. As rumpled and caustic as ever, DCI Stanhope contends with a new assistant in Set 5. Detective Sergeant Aiden Healy (Kenny Doughty, Stella, Snowpiercer) is still recovering from an on-the-job trauma, but Vera shows little patience for his psychological scars. If their partnership is to work, Healy will quickly have to get accustomed to the sometimes unconventional methods his boss employs—to unearth the truth, crack a case, and catch a killer.