Death by Persuasion

A Jane Austen weekend is about as Midsomer a setting as the show has ever found: people in period dress, polite conversation, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts on. And then a young woman slips away from the festivities, still in her costume, and is found stabbed in the woods. Barnaby is left to solve a murder that looks like it belongs in a novel, except that novels have endings.

The case sends him backwards. The killing, it becomes clear, has its roots in events that predate the weekend and probably the century. Gemma Christie, Nell Fryer and her father Ray, Mary Oswood, Ronin Chow and Solomon Franks all move through the polite surface of the gathering, and Barnaby has to look past the manners and the accents to the people underneath. Everyone at a Jane Austen event is, to some degree, in character; the trick is finding the one who stopped acting. The woodland where the body is found keeps the whole affair suitably gothic.

The episode's strength is that the past is not decoration. The answers to the murder are written in older feuds, and the weekend is just the stage it plays out on. Barnaby's gentle doggedness suits a case where nobody will say anything directly, and Winter's sharper edges balance him out. The interviews have the rhythm of a country dance, circling and returning, until someone steps wrong.

Chris Murray and Caroline Graham wrote it, Alex Pillai directed. Neil Dudgeon and Nick Hendrix lead the inquiry, Fiona Dolman is along as Sarah. Susie Blake plays Gemma Christie, Abigail Cruttenden and Nicholas Gleaves are the Fryers, Georgie Glen is Mary Oswood, Chris Lew Kum Hoi plays Ronin Chow, John Macmillan is Solomon Franks, and Anamaria Marinca appears as Petra Antonescu.

It is one of the more atmospheric outings, all mists and manners, with the menace arriving quietly. And it is a reminder that Barnaby is happiest when the setting does half his work for him.