Another Life

Frost returns to Denton CID after seven months of suspension — the punch that ended Held in Trust finally paid for — and the series drops him back into the job with a pair of cases and a toothache from a defective lollipop. He is teamed with DS Maureen Lawson again, and the partnership picks up its old rhythm at once: two investigations, one grotesque, one squalid, and a man who cannot sit still for either.

The first case is a dance of death. a dismembered body turns up in a fridge, and when the pieces are assembled, the corpse has two left feet — one belonging to a second victim. The trail leads to the fiercely competitive local ballroom scene and to Delores Delmonte, a victory-obsessed dancer played by Amanda Root with glittering, terrifying composure. She killed the man who abandoned her for a new partner; she is caught getting ready to dispatch her latest one after losing another competition. Arrested, she explains herself without a flicker of remorse: she was ending the men's misery, she says — they lacked the talent to dance at her level.

The second case is quieter and crueller. Eddie Burrows, found stabbed and dumped in a canal, was holding £6,000 in cash and leading two separate lives with two families. Frost wonders if a wronged wife took revenge — but the truth is more venal: Burrows was blackmailing a local doctor and a pharmacist over a fraudulent medicine scheme. The doctor's wife, Antonia Knight, confronted Burrows to make him stop; when he mocked her, she stabbed him. Lucy Robinson makes Antonia's descent from respectable wife to killer feel like a door closing.

Another Life, written by David Gilman and directed by Roger Bamford, marks the series' late-period confidence: two murders, one baroque and one banal, each solved with the same grumbling persistence. The episode's title carries the weight of Frost's own long exile — the life he left behind, the one he has come back to, and the lollipop that nearly cost him a tooth.

A confident return for Frost after suspension, with two murders — one baroque, one banal — and a reunion with Lawson that restores the show's old rhythm at once. A confident return after the wilderness years.