Poisonous time at posh party
BBC2, 9pm THIS Sherlock-esque drama returns with more mysterious cases for the investigator and his sidekick to solve.
Everyone needs a go-to person, and for the Vienna police, Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer) does the head-scratching whenever there’s a murder.
He often calls upon a young doctor, Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard), for help in solving his cases. But this one is slightly different.
It is autumn 1907, and at a lavish dinner party in Vienna a Hungarian countess appears to be having a panic attack, finally collapsing and clutching at her throat.
The next morning she is found drowned in the bath – and it looks like she took her own life.
But of course Inspector Rheinhardt does not believe it’s suicide, he suspects foul play.
Intense scrutiny falls on her psychoanalyst, who just so happens to be Max, who the depressed countess saw three days ago.
Max told her to stop taking her prescribed medicine and start taking a course of Freud’s talking cure – aka therapy – with himself.
Inspector Rheinhardt teams up with the disgraced doctor to solve the riddle of the woman’s death and clear Max’s professional reputation.
Some doctors are calling for him to be struck off, and he even makes the front page of the newspaper.
But a post-mortem reveals that the countess was poisoned, which turns Max and Rheinhardt’s attention to Oktav Hauke, a young second lieutenant with a reputation for dubious relationships with rich, older women.
For fans of period drama and a classic murder mystery, this is an enjoyable whodunit.