From Doon with Death: Part One

Margaret Parsons was an ordinary housewife, a lay preacher, the kind of woman a town barely notices. She had recently moved to Kingsmarkham with her husband Ron, who works for the water board. Then she is found murdered in a field, and the ordinary part stops holding. The episode's hook arrives when Wexford goes through her belongings and finds a number of expensive antique books, each one inscribed 'From Doon to Minna'.

That inscription is the engine of the whole story. Who is Doon? Who is Minna? A woman whose life appeared to be nothing but church and housekeeping turns out to have a history written in gift-plate form, and Wexford, who dislikes loose ends the way other men dislike wasps, starts pulling at the thread. The books are the sort of clue that makes a detective happy and a husband nervous, and Malcolm Storry's Ron Parsons looks increasingly like a man whose wife he did not fully know.

George Baker's Wexford leads the enquiry with his usual appetite for the strange detail, and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is at his side. The local cast is a strong one: Geoffrey Bateman's Douglas Quadrant, Amanda Redman's Helen Missal, Elizabeth Bennett's Fabia Quadrant, Petra Davies' Miss Fowler, Sally Grace's Clare Clark, Amanda Mainard's Di Stevens and Sasha Mitchell's WPC. Amusingly, the man playing Wexford also wrote the episode: George Baker himself took the writing credit, with Mary McMurray directing.

The hour works because it takes a quiet murder and refuses to let it stay quiet. An uneventful life, a field, a body, and then a shelf of expensive books with a mysterious dedication. The gothic undertones are all in the inscription, and the episode knows it, ending with the question hanging in the air that the second part will have to answer: who was Doon?