The Village That Rose from the Dead

A ghost village gets a second life, and the first thing it does is produce a body. The reopening of the old place brings crowds to see the restored cottages, and it brings a murder: a man found dead in the middle of the revival. For Barnaby the case has two addresses, one in the present and one in the past, and the past is the one doing the talking.

He works it with Jamie Winter, the temporary DS who has just been handed to him. The two of them have to untangle a village's worth of lies before they get anywhere near the killer. The Craven family sits at the centre of it: Roderick, Milo, Corina and Andrea, with Lucy Keswick close by and Finn Thornberry somewhere in the middle. A place that died once and came back keeps its secrets in good working order, and most of those secrets belong to the Cravens.

The mystery reaches back across decades, and Barnaby's trick of wearing people down with patience works as well as ever. Winter watches, learns, and asks the occasional sharp question; it is a good introduction to the new arrangement, even if the occasion is a murder. The village's revival was supposed to be a fresh start. It turns out to be a reopening, in every sense.

Rachel Cuperman, Sally Griffiths and Caroline Graham wrote it, Nicholas Laughland directed. Neil Dudgeon's Barnaby is joined by Nick Hendrix as Jamie Winter, the new DS settling in, with Fiona Dolman and Manjinder Virk in support. The Cravens are Angus Wright, Hugh Dennis, Catherine Steadman and Pippa Haywood, Sally Phillips plays Lucy Keswick, and Edwin Thomas is Finn Thornberry.

It is a heavyweight episode, packed with characters and backstory, and it earns its length. And there is something quietly right about a mystery set in a village that rose from the dead. That is what this show does, week after week: it keeps coming back, no matter how many bodies pile up.