It's becoming a familiar theme in TV dramas – the London detectives who move to quiet provincial towns but find themselves yearning for "the big cases and exciting days of old".
"Be careful what you wish for!" said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian by way of advice to these fictional police officers. Because "from Midsomer to Grantchester, the Calder Valley to Shetland, nowhere is safe from TV writers", said The Independent.
Perhaps if these policemen and women had watched more British murder mysteries, they'd be aware that "behind the picture-book hills and lakes, stone-walled lanes, and villages with nothing more than a pub and post office, there is plenty to be feared".
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Suffering from a "sense of being outside the action", Riya soon has to draw together "disparate threads of local discontent: a missing Swedish tourist, a strange road traffic accident, and the re-emergence of a man, Eddie Wells (Barry Sloane), who she put away for a violent crime five years earlier". And there's also trouble at the bread factory and a "subplot involving protesters at a fracking site".
The Guardian's Mangan thinks the "mundane and the mystical" are kept in a "nice balance, each one enhancing the potential horror of the other". The show "leans into its folkloric and televisual tropes", she said, "while still delivering something that feels fresh and real".
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