Good news for the tourist industry in St Andrew’s, the photogenic Scottish university town previously made famous by a prince and an amateur catwalk model named Kate Middleton. Now it’s got its very own eponymous TV detective series – Karen Pirie. Just like in Bath, Oxford, Bristol, Jersey, Shetland and countless other real and semi-fictional picturesque locations with infeasibly high rates of homicide, soon visitors from all over the world will be able to come and see where celebrated decapitations, drownings and poisonings didn’t actually take place.
The first killing in this new venture splats onto our screens with the disembowelling of a barmaid, her body dumped in the grounds of the cathedral – about as shocking a femicide conceivable. Yet, by contrast, and unusually for a regional detective series, there is nothing unusual or idiosyncratic about its hero. The prosaically named Karen Pirie (Lauren Lyle) is a young detective sergeant who finds herself unexpectedly in charge of a cold case investigation of this gruesome murder of a 19-year-old woman, committed a quarter of a century ago. The revised police interest in the case is prompted by an investigative journalist, played by Rakhee Thakrar, who suggests that the police were negligent in their original casework, due to pernicious sexism and corruption. Can Pirie solve the case before the pesky podcaster?
