Confection

Mid-September 1969, and the murder of a chocolate factory owner during a local hunt is the sort of crime that should be an open-and-shut affair in a sleepy village like Chigton Green. It is not. On the same morning, a woman who worked at the factory is gunned down outside her home, and her husband's body is found inside, apparently a suicide. Morse arrives to find a community where the poison is not in the chocolates but in the gossip.

A vicious campaign of rumour and poison pen notes seems to sit behind what looks like a double murder and suicide, and the recipients keep turning up dead or damaged. One of the note's targets, a beautiful single mother, catches Morse's attention in a way that gives him uncomfortable food for thought about his own future. Meanwhile Strange is chasing a string of heroin overdose deaths, and Thursday makes an out-of-character decision that nobody sees coming.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Leanne Welham directed. Joe Bone is Michael Murphy, Oliver Farnworth is PC Rich Potter, Christopher Harper is John Hazel, Sophie Stanton is Letty Clamp, Olivia Chenery is Isla Fairford, Ben Lamb is Rupert Creswell, Katie Goldfinch is Sarah Clamp, Claudia Jolly is Clemmie Creswell, Jack Hawkins is Murray Creswell, and Sean Rigby is DS Jim Strange.

The poison pen campaign is a deliciously nasty engine for a mystery, and the episode lets it wind through the village like bad weather. Morse's interest in the single mother is handled gently, a rare moment of him imagining a life rather than solving one. Strange's heroin investigation and Thursday's out-of-character decision both pull at the edges of the main case, so that even the village's quiet story never quite sits still.

Small-town secrets, professional police work and personal reflection, all stirred together, and the atmosphere does the rest.