Doesn’t time fly? Here we are with yet another instalment of the misleadingly named Nordic Murders, set not in the Nordics, but on the German/Polish border on the island of Usedom in the Vorpommern-Greifswald district of Germany.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
Katrin Sass returns as Karin Lossow, a former district attorney who back in 2014 at Season 1 had just served a six-year prison sentence for killing her husband. She is currently mourning the loss of her daughter, Julia Thiel, who was murdered in a previous season. A man confessed to the crime, but Karin believes that he was just a fall-guy, and that the real man responsible is a Karol Zielinski, a crime boss and businessman.
Karin has been referred to a therapist just across the border in Poland to help with the grief of her loss, but when she explains to him about the death of her daughter and lets slip the name of Zielinski, the therapist immediately stops her and informs her than he cannot see her any longer because of a conflict of interest – but does not explain what that conflict is. It turns out that Zielinski’s sister-in-law is seeing the same therapist and has clearly spoken of her concerns about him to the therapist.
When the therapist subsequently goes missing, Karin joins forces with his husband to try and find out where he’s gone and whether or not Zielinski has had a hand in his disappearance. But Karin’s interference in the case causes issues both within her own family and also with the Polish police.
Meanwhile, a dead body has turned up in Usedom – a partially-naked man found frozen to death on a park bench. The local police force, led by Inspector Rainer Witt (Till Firit) with his trusty team of Holm Brendel and Dorit Martens (Rainer Sellien and Jana Julia Roth), can find no sign of trauma on his body and no identification. The postmortem reveals that he was drugged shortly before his death, and once a local man has handed in the dead man’s wallet, further investigation by Brendel and Martens reveals that he had been a user of a dating website.
Each episode of this long-running series is around 90 minutes, which gives the storyline plenty of time to develop, and is particularly useful considering there are two threads to the narrative – Karin’s investigation into her daughter’s death and the man frozen to death. If you’re a fan of the likes of Shetland or Vera, you will find plenty to like here. It’s not too dark, the characters are likable and – mostly – believable. The scripts are nicely structured. After six seasons (and a seventh on the way) they’ve got a well drilled formula.
You don’t really need to have seen the previous seasons to pick up the thread, but for full clarity on the backstory about Karin and her situation, it’s probably advisable to do so.
Walter Presents: ‘The Nordic Murders' Season 6 is available as a full boxset on C4 Streaming now.
