jennifertrathan

I love the books that this series is based on, but like almost all of the films and TV series today that are adapted from popular books it bears very little resemblance to the source material. I'm finding that Angie in the series is way nicer than Angie in the books, who is pretty awful to Will.

This episode is based on the 6th book in the series, Criminal. By now Will's relationship with Sara Linton is well established and she is helping him with his work. After all, she is a trauma doctor/medical examiner as well as the widow of Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver (she'd had 6 novels of her own before Will Trent had had a word written about him). Their relationship is the main reason so many of us continue to read the Will Trent series. So when is she going to appear in the TV version?

Having enjoyed all of the previous series I was looking forward to seing what they'd do with this after the shocking ending to the final episode of series 4. I watched the whole of series 5 in one go on itvX but I won't, however, be watching any future series. They firmly nailed their political colours to the mast with so many of the characters throughout each episode expressing their disgust of the character who had committed the unforgivable sin of being a Tory minister. To be honest, I found nearly all of the main characters (apart from the police team investigating the murder) to be truly horrible people. Even the ones we were meant to empathise with were awful. I kept hoping it would get better, but sadly, it didn't so that's me finished with it.

I'm normally a big fan of Vera, in fact I spent a few weeks recently re-watching the older episodes and was surprised to find that I hadn't seen a couple of them when they were originally shown so enjoyed catching up on the ones I'd missed. Almost every series, they film in my town so it's become a bit of a thing on Facebook, during the show everyone has to post that we're on the telly again. However, I wasn't impressed with this one and ended up feeling that this was the weakest episode so far. I think my main problem was the poor acting by the lesser characters, who mostly had dreadful Geordie accents as well. One of the characters kept bursting into bad-tempered rants and he was a bit too over-the-top for my liking. Of course Brenda Blethyn and the team were like a well oiled machine, and the new doc is even growing on me, but I think that this is the first episode I haven't really enjoyed.