Haven't seen the second half of this show yet, but the murder plot set-up is intriguing, including the fact that understandably the husband, David Haddeley, was the chief suspect in his wife Kathy's murder. Yet lacking evidence, the investigation stalled. It is revived 6 years later when the wife's decomposed body is finally found, hidden in a tree, deep in the woods (which at the time was part of a gated & barbed-wire fenced military camp). Ridley comes into the cold case, and tries to bring the original ex-detective Jean Dixon, back to help since she is intimately knowledgeable about the case and also became very close with the murdered wife's daughter, Sam.
Now, this is the part of the writing I don't like. Dixon is portrayed as refusing to help the new investigators because she holds a grudge against Ridley and DCI DEl Paul Goodwin for their actions in a different case which ended in her disgrace and leaving the force. This Haddeley case was supposedly so incredibly important to her, including her concern over the extreme trauma suffered by the victim's then-13-year-old daughter Sam, (and Dixon's belief that the husband David was guilty) yet she's pettily repeatedly refusing her help. Finally, she grudgingly agrees to provided limited help, again repeatedly asserting she's only doing it, not for them, but for Kathy and Sam. As if that isn't bleedingly obvious without stating it at all, much less so many times.
When Jean does talk to the daughter, Sam says the body can't be her mum's because ever since Kathy left, she's been sending texts to Sam, saying she left of her own accord, did not want to come back, etc., but would come back for Sam some day. Thus, Sam has kept quiet about that and other aspects of the family's dynamics. So who's sending the texts?
A major 'sub-plot' here is Jean's personal life with her new boyfriend Ross. Initially, he's sweetly caring, but it soon becomes clear that he's a controlling, manipulative SOB, which Jean's daughter Molly saw from the start. When it dawns on Jean, he goes from sweet to lashing out, both verbally and physically. (BTW, in the UK, the National Legal Service has a good site on such behaviour.)
