Penthouse and Pavement

A famous horror novelist is found dead in an alley, the morning after a prestigious book launch. It's the kind of death that brings the press running, and DCI Matt Burke is already in a temper before he reaches the scene. The months since the team's last outing have done nothing for his people skills; he remains a gruff so-and-so who shouts far more than is really necessary.

The investigation starts with a single unpromising lead: a drugged and confused prostitute with a memory problem. Burke and his detectives set about piecing together the novelist's last movements from the fragments she can manage. But as the fragments come together, the story of an upstanding man of letters begins to fray. Evidence surfaces that does the late author's reputation no favours, and the case becomes a question of which version of him actually died in that alley. The media frenzy around the launch keeps the pressure on, and Burke's attempts to quell it provide some of the episode's best moments.

Glenn Chandler and Robert Fraser wrote it, Patrick Harkins directed. The ensemble is led by Blythe Duff's Jackie Reid, John Michie's Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's Stuart Fraser, with Alex Norton's Burke barking orders over the top. Lesley Harcourt's Gemma Kerr is on hand, with Kate Dickie as Debbie Thomson, Juliet Cadzow as Moira Randall, Cora Bissett as Carrie Anderson, David McKay as Keith Leyland and Judith Fitzgerald as Babs.

It's an episode about the gap between the man on the book jacket and the man in the alley, and the team spend their time staring into it. The image of the upstanding citizen was always the real fiction, and the enquiry takes its time proving it. Burke is rarely more fun to watch than when he's angry at a world that won't behave. The dead novelist gets the mystery; Burke gets the comedy, and the balance holds.