Payback

If you're looking for an excellent mystery binge watch, I highly recommend this series. The mystery starts right away and builds to the end.

Morven Christie is always likeable, even more so in this role. Her life is flipped upside down and she's left trying to make sense of the who and why. She is thrown into a world she knew nothing about and used her resilience and determination to power through.

Peter Mullan is fantastic as a powerful, dangerous man. I'm used to seeing Julie Graham play strong yet sensitive characters and she does a great job as a crime lord's wife.

I'd never seen Prassana Puwanarajah before and was captivated by how well he portrayed a DC who was a mix of empathetic and intense. I'll be watching for him in other roles!

I thought that the first episode was a bit slow and had too many plot holes although, as I am not going to write "spoilers", I won't list these. But they did reduce my final rating from 9 ot 8.

However, having now watched all the remaining 5 episodes, it does get better as it goes along - with fewer plot holes - and finishes with a good last episode, with no open ending laying the ground for another series.

I thought that all the actors playing the main characters did well, and there were few weaknesses. I also liked the writing and direction and, unlike so many crime series these days, didn't rely any chases between the "goodies and baddies" to bolster the plot.

This series is well worth four hours of your time.

Let's start with the good. I'm not one of those people who are always looking for the next big innovative thing. This is a story of a woman whose husband is murdered and is left with a whole bunch of problems because of things that he did that she didn't know about. Not the first time a story like this was done but it's still interesting enough so I decided to give it a chance. First I'd say that the acting is excellent! Everyone is playing their part really great. Second, the story itself is unfolding in a descent pace. Not too fast but not too slow either. I always prefer a faster pace but as long as it's not too slow, it's ok. The production value is good too and again, six episodes aren't too much for this kind of a story. I make this point because I really don't like it that some shows are dragged out on on just to get more episodes. It's not like that in this show. So know that if you're looking for a fast paced action, this isn't it. It's a good paced thriller/drama.

Now to the bad part, while the ending is not terrible. Personally, I wasn't impressed. I really hate loose ends and there are several questions that aren't really answered (I'll write a more detailed review for the last episode). I just wasn't satisfied with the way the last episode unfolded. Too much of it didn't feel right to me. I can't say much more without spoiling it but because I found the show to be mostly very good I was hoping for a more satisfying ending.

I made the mistake of reading some bad reviews and almost didn't watch this. It's way better than average and how anyone can give it only one star is beyond me. It was produced by Jed Mercurio the creator of Line of Duty so it was a cut above. The plot is unusual in that it involves finance and the hiding of illicit profits. It is well written, well acted, well directed and has great pace. What's not to like? Morven Christie, Peter Mullen and Derek Riddell are good as always and it's great to see Steven Mackintosh on our screens again. DC Kahn played by Prasanna Puwanarajah is an interesting conflicted character. Well worth a watch. My only quibble was Lexie being in tears the whole time.

An apparently happily married-with-children male accountant is ruthlessly stabbed to death by a bunch of young thugs one Edinburgh morning while his wife looks on aghast nearby. Apparently he was the bookkeeper of a heavyweight gangster Peter Mullan who's managed to live very comfortably on his ill-gotten gains just outside the reach of the law.

However the gangster it seems was just about to break cover with the purchase of a small, populated island in the Outer Hebrides, only it seems that before he inconveniently got killed, the accountant scuppered the transaction with 28 million unaccounted for. Mullan still wants his island, for a very good reason which will become clear later, so he goes after the dead man's widow, Morven Christie, also an accountant and co-partner in the family firm, using every dirty trick in the book short of physical violence to coerce her into tracking down and retrieving his money.

He allocates his short-tempered young nephew to be her minder but even as she's reluctantly forced to turn forensic detective for this sinister criminal, she's also the focal point of two separate police investigations, the first rather improbably trying to fit her up for organising her husband's death and the other seeking to use her as a mole to bring down Mullan and his empire from the inside.

I did find it a bit difficult to follow the paper trail to the missing millions with its surreptitious accounting practices and obscure terminologies and of course the plot itself was far-fetched in the extreme with a number of contrived cliff-hanging situations and unlikely plot developments but somehow by the end the Gordian knot was duly untangled, just desserts duly administered and there was even a happy ending of sorts for Christie, her family and that Edinburgh essential, the foreign family nanny, that's if you consider going into the witness protection programme a good thing.

As a Scot, I enjoyed the familiar Edinburgh settings and the acting of the principals, Christie and Mullan plus it was nice to see Steven Mackintosh back on the small screen as Mullan's financial fixer although some of the support acting was rather mixed in quality.

Nevertheless, my wife and I enjoyed this roller-coaster six-part series and can think of worse ways to spend the cold dark winter nights than watching this.