PICK OF THE WEEK

Dublin Murders Neon

If the great Scottish detective Taggart were still around, you know exactly what he’d have to say: there’s been a mur-dur.

These days murders are so common that detectives don’t feel the need to make such announcements, especially not the pair of tortured souls in Dublin Murders.

Rob, permanently clad in a sharp tailored menswear, and Cassie, who looks equally sharp in double denim, are a good team. Within the show’s first five minutes they force a confession, then, to celebrate, go for a smoke, an Irish coffee and a sandwich on the world’s gloomiest looking wharf.

When they get back to the office, the boss already has a new job for them: “Get off your arse and go out to the country.”

Maybe this is splitting hairs, or it might get resolved in a later episode, but it’s worth noting that the main murders in Dublin Murders don’t actually take place in Dublin. They happen two hours drive away, in the woods near a small town called Knocknaree.

Some archaeology students have found the body of a 13-year-old girl while doing a dig in preparation for a new motorway being built.

“Your boots are in the back,” Rob tells Cassie on the drive there. “Is it the woods?” she asks. It’s the opposite of Carpool Karaoke, but we soon discover why — back in 1985 “the woods” she speaks of were the scene of another, eerily similar case, where three kids went in and only one came out alive.

That kid was Rob, whose survivor’s guilt haunts him to this day; Cassie is the only one who knows his secret.

That much is hinted at through a series of flashbacks, before being explicitly revealed at the end of the first episode. But fans of dark, layered detective dramas will be hooked long before then.