Dublin Murders: You Can Go Your Own Way

My wife and I just finished the first (and so far, only) season on Dublin Murders on Starz.  It's a strange, compelling BBC series set in - of course - Dublin, and I hope it's the first of more to come.

It has a pace and focus and intensity all its own.  Although the two murder cases are solved by the end, they're solved in a way that leaves much more open than we find at the end of most other American, British, or for that matter, any murder series made anywhere in the world.  Whether that's due to a strict adherence to the novels of Tanya French upon which this season was based, I couldn't say, as I haven't read the novels.  But I very much like this very different way of telling two interlocking stories.

As is often the case, though, in stories dubbed this or that murder or murders, the narrative is really much more about the detectives investigating the cases than the murders.  In this case, Rob Reilly and Cassie Maddox, very well played by Killian Scott and Sarah Greene, are a very compelling if ill-fated team, or are very compelling because they're ill-fated, both individually and as a team and, just for good measure, as a romantic couple.   Rob is really Adam, a boy who witnessed a murder and escaped - a murder in the same woods in Dublin where, back now in his new identity as the English detective Rob, he's investigating a murder that happened in the same woods.  He's investigating this with and against the best advice of his partner, Cassie, who is also damaged goods herself, having as a child been in the back seat of a car in which her parents drove into a stag (a male deer) and were killed.  She makes up a character, Lexie, who turns out to be real and ... well, I don't want to give too much away, in case you haven't seen Dublin Murders, which you should (and if you haven't, you probably shouldn't have read this far, anyway, but, in any case, don't read any further).

I will say that I don't like the way the finale handled their love affair - or, at least, the love Rob wanted to profess when he asked Cassie to call him back.  I mean, a series of things getting in the way of professing one's true love was already old hat after Jane Austen did it so well in her novels.

Will there be another season of Dublin Murders?  There should be.  Will it have all new characters?  I pretty much hope not, because I want to see more of Rob and Cassie, but I'll watch it anyway.