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The Sinner ( Netflix)

The first season opens with a shocking murder when Cora (Jessica Biel, right), a seemingly normal woman, stabs to death a man she doesn’t know on a crowded lakeside beach in broad daylight. It’s a random attack. It makes no sense. ‘Everyone knows she did it. No one knows why,’ the ad said, but over the course of eight episodes rumpled Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman), a man separated from his wife and not without his own issues, works out why.

In the second season, Ambrose investigates the poisoning of a married couple by their 13-yearold son. Again, it’s a dark and disturbing psychological whydunnit with plenty of twists and turns.

The third season sees the detective looking into a car accident in which the driver was killed. The dead man’s old college friend – their acquaintance had only just been renewed – was in the passenger seat and survived. A tragedy, but might there be more to it? Ambrose has his suspicions.

If there is a connection between the three seasons, other than Pullman’s character, it is extreme belief systems – religious, psychological and philosophical – and their unhappy consequences.

What fans love, along with Pullman’s performance, is the gradual unravelling of the mystery through flashbacks explaining why the suspect’s psyche is in the fractured state it is. The new season is perhaps a case of diminishing returns but The Sinner is still consistently compelling, surprising and sometimes shocking.