Anger Management (1)

A death in a halfway house for released prisoners opens this one. A man uses a gun, and it's put down as suicide. Except it's a probation house, the dead man worked there, and Waking the Dead has never once met a tidy suicide it believed. Sure enough, the investigation starts picking at the seams.

The gun is the thread that unravels everything. At some point after the death it goes missing from Dr Frankie Wharton's own laboratory, which is bad enough, but its history is worse. Tracing it back, Boyd finds the weapon may have been a working tool for a hired assassin across nine murders spread over thirty years. One shabby death in one care-home corridor suddenly has three decades of contract killing hanging off it.

And then there's Boyd himself, who has been packed off to anger management classes while all this unfolds. It's a good joke with a serious point underneath: the man hunting a killer's temper is the squad member least in control of his own. Trevor Eve plays it exactly right, jaw tight, pen tapping.

John Milne, Andy Hay and Barbara Machin wrote it, Andy Hay directed, first shown in August 2004. Eve leads as Det Supt Peter Boyd, with Sue Johnston as Dr Grace Foley, Holly Aird as Dr Frankie Wharton, Claire Goose as DS Amelia Silver and Wil Johnson as DI Spencer Jordan. The guests are strong: Nigel Terry as Sam Jacobs, T.P. McKenna as Phil Brown, Kerry Fox as Elsbeth Varley, Andrew Tiernan as Don Keech and Q as Mark Andrews.

What I like about this half is how small it starts. A room, a body, an assumption everyone was happy to make about a man nobody would miss. The show then widens the lens until you're looking at nine killings and a gun that kept finding new hands. Part two has questions to answer.