In the Public Interest

Three naked corpses are dug up at an old burial site, laid out in a perfect triangle, and an American anthropologist tells Frost with absolute certainty that these are ritual killings. The truth is grimmer and more ordinary: the men, Eastern European immigrant workers, were killed by carbon monoxide from a faulty heater in shabby lodgings, and their landlord buried them in the triangle on purpose — to make the police believe in a ritual so the case would go nowhere. The anthropologist, it emerges, has a book to promote, and the ritual story sells copies. The episode's first case is a study in how easily the truth is buried under a better story.

The second case is the series' last great duel. James Callum, a wealthy, ruthless businessman, is knocking down the local youth club for office space and buying up local newspapers to smear his opponents. His mistress, Rosemary, is discovered dead on her houseboat, and Frost's investigation walks straight into Callum's world of purchased influence and threatened reputations. Frost's home is ransacked as a warning. The truth is stranger than the cover-up: Callum's fiercely loyal personal assistant Michael is transgender — Michelle, his long-term partner — and it was Michael's jealousy, fed by Callum's endless affairs, that turned murderous and killed Rosemary. Callum, discovering Michael about to kill Frost, shoots his own lover in the back — a killing arranged to look heroic, a problem solved and a reputation burnished in one act. He leaves confident that it will come down to Frost's word against his, until Frost reveals the audio recording that captured everything.

In the Public Interest, written by Thomas Ellice and directed by Paul Harrison, gives the series one of its most modern villains — a man who owns the newspapers, the council and the narrative — and one of its most satisfying endings, with the recording that finally beats him. The triangle of bodies is the episode's thesis: power arranges the truth into whatever shape serves it, and Frost, with his tape recorder and his stubbornness, is the only force in Denton that refuses to be arranged.

A modern-villain two-hander in which the man who owns the newspapers nearly wins — until Frost's tape recorder beats him. A satisfying late triumph for the series' stubbornest detective.