Some elements of mystery, but basically a police procedural, or rather, psychodrama. The love interest, Andrea Lowe, is fetching and has a face which would no doubt have allowed a successful career as a magazine model. Moral of the story, presumably in Canadian Peter Robinson's novel from which this is adapted, is that shutting out feelings leads to inhuman acts, suddenly dawning at the last moment on the eponymous protagonist, who, as played by Stephen Tomkinson at least, no one could possibly think devoid of emotion, nor the woman PC, who, in retribution for the lethal attack on her lover/partner, bludgeons the "suspect" to death. If drunk on duty, the author intimates, she would be culpable, but as a victim is only human. For, as victims we cannot be held responsible, and may feel as guilty as we like. That's liberal pap, of course, for it's control of passion, which makes us responsible, not its absence, as Freud and generations of sermons intoned, a conundrum upon which civilization rests. It makes the accessory, nevertheless played astonishingly well by Charlotte Riley, into a victim, as if it were possible for evil to have never arisen at all with loving child-rearing. Tho this is still debated by wings of the "neo-Freudian" object relations school, as much as by the Romantics, babies are not born innocent, nor was humankind. The author would no doubt like living instead in France where such crimes of passion are coupled with repressive government.
Review of Aftermath: Part 1
