STARZ's 'Dublin Murders': Mysterious, Compelling and Challenging
The first episode of Dublin Murders aired this week on premium cable network Starz, and we're all really hoping the series will be as good as this beginning. Just to be clear, I am a great admirer of author Tana French’s writing, and I think I was at an advantage, knowing what was going on (most of the time). And before you read on, or dive into the series, please be aware that this a series centered on childhood trauma and murder.
I was surprised to find that the writer of the series, Sarah Phelps, decided to combine the first two books, In The Woods and The Likeness into one story, following a conversation with French in which she admitted that she tends to think of her books in pairs. I’m still not sure whether this will work: clearly In The Woods is Rob Reilly’s story and The Likeness is Cassie Maddox’s.
The acting is extraordinary. We meet our protagonists Rob Reilly (Killian Scott, Augustus Dove in Ripper Street) and Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene, Hecate in Penny Dreadful) of the Dublin Murder Squad four months before the case featured in In The Woods. In a few short, brilliantly choreographed scenes, we see the two detectives investigate and solve a convenience store murder, reading each other’s verbal and physical cues with the ease of deep understanding. But it only seems to go so far—Cassie knows Rob’s deepest secret, but we don’t know what else they hide from each other.
Rob and Cassie's next case, the story at the heart of French's first novel In The Woods, sees this delicate balance begin to unravel. The victim is a thirteen-year-old girl, Katy Devlin, found on an archaeological excavation, posed on a stone altar, in a wooded rural area. In the same location, twenty-one years earlier, three children went into these same woods and only one was found. The mystery has never been solved and it turns out Rob is this survivor, who has never remembered, or admitted to, what happened that day. Boarding school in England and a name change have successfully concealed his identity. Both he and Cassie know they should not take on this case, but they can’t let it go.
