Loch Ness

A complex multi-murder mystery set around the titular body of water and largely taking place in the fictional town of Luchnary. This has improved my knowledge of Scottish geography as I investigated the area on Google maps and identified Fort Augustus as the filming location (at least for the establishing shots), and I hadn’t realised how close Inverness was to the Loch, nor that there is little in the way of roads on the Eastern shore.

There is a fairly good attempt at making the location an integral part of the story – the local DCI recognises that a serial killer in Loch Ness will draw the world’s attention, and many of the characters are involved in the tourist trade (there doesn’t seem to be much other commercial activity!).

There’s a huge amount of incident packed into the six episodes, largely because almost everyone in the town seems to have some major secrets that are harshly revealed (thankfully our heroine’s family secret turns out to be quite minor on this scale). Whether the sheer density of weird goings-on in this small Scottish town is at all credible is an open question.

I like the way the action moves along, the only over-long “tease” is the body in the loch that, annoyingly, is almost found on several occasions such that by the final episode we are yelling at the team to look in the lake for goodness sake!

This isn’t great TV – there’s far too much coincidence (no-one here has a dull and unexciting life) and just too many secrets packed into a small space, and the police psychological profiler is not very likeable (yet has history, inevitably, with the SIO) but it is watchable and interesting. There was no second series and I for one don’t need one – so much happened here to have it all over again would stretch credibility too far.