Dublin Murders

A dark and well-made show about the effects of psychological trauma, but the bifurcated narrative is a significant mistake

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this – two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

• Tana French; In the Woods (2007)

Sarte was right, Hell is other people.

• Tana French; The Likeness (2008)

Airing on BBC One in the UK and Ireland and Starz in North America, Dublin Murders is an eight-part series that adapts the first two novels in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series – In the Woods (2007) and The Likeness (2008). And herein lies the show's biggest problem. French's series is pseudo-anthological in design; each novel has a different protagonist, and although there are common characters across all of the stories, each plot is wholly self-contained. In writing Dublin Murders, Sarah Phelps has made the strange decision to present the plots of the first two novels as happening concurrently, with each case bleeding slightly into the other. This doesn't even remotely work, with the events of The Likeness never feeling like anything other than a half-baked B-plot that serves only to detract from the far superior material in the A-plot. It's a maddening decision, as In the Woods could have made a superb five or six-part series, but instead we've got an over-long eight-parter with a ton of what feels like completely extraneous fat. Nevertheless, there is much to laud here; the acting, the cinematography, production design, and art direction, the editing and directing, and, when focusing on the first novel, much of Phelps' writing, which admirably captures the thematic and tonal essence of French's 500-page interiorised narrative.

The show takes place in 2006 and begins with the discovery of the body of twelve-year-old Katy Devlin (Amy Macken) in the woods around Knocknaree, a (fictional) housing estate in Dublin's suburbs. Detectives Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) and Cassie Maddox (Sarah...