User Reviews

I wasn't sure about this series back after watching ep 1, but kept going and it very quickly gripped me.

I figured out whodunnit for the modern mystery in ep 4, when Charles slipped up with ref to the roadworks, (though I had no idea WHY he dunnit) and similarly realised Robert was the killer in the fifties as soon as they said he threw himself into the lake to "help" Brant, confirmed when we were told ONE brother had been given a dog - what sort of idiot does that?! You don't give one child something like a DOG and not the other! Once again, I had to wait for Atticus to tell me how & why it was all done.

I loved the reveal of the anagrams, especially the one made from Atticus Pund, and Susan did a great job working it all out. She gets no brownie points at all though for TURNING HER BACK ON A KILLER! Rookie error, really, showing your back to someone you've just established has already committed one murder! It was quite funny though, the choice of weapon being the Golden Dagger award from the CWA - the Crime Writers Association.

Dead author Alan really was a swine though, with the way he put people into his books in the nastiest way he could.

I understand the book is arranged differently, but the way the TV version flipped back and forth, used the same actors and had Atticus popping into Susan's world was highly entertaining.

All in all this was a very entertaining, enjoyable series and I also hope there will be more.

I am a big fan of Anthony Horowitz and Lesley Manville. The book is fabulous and the BBC production is very clever. They trust the audience to follow the doppelgängers, separate the fiction within a fiction.

Then in the last episode, Lesley Manville wakes up in hospital after being beaten up and in a fire and she has full makeup : eye liner, lipstick, lashes... This is a production error, not Manville's or Horowitz.

This is so surprising after the film director has taken so much care in cinematography and creating transitions from the story within a story.

I am complaining because everything else was darn near perfect.