Saint-Pierre (U&Alibi)
Rating: Four out of five stars
The patron saint of murderers is Julian the Hospitaller, a fourth-century pilgrim who was cursed from birth to kill his own parents.
Trying to escape his fate, he ran away from home. One day, he went out hunting and came home to find two strangers sleeping in his bed. Outraged, he stabbed them to death.
Guess who they turned out to be?
Filled with remorse at murdering his mum and dad, Julian decided to open a hospice and spent the rest of his life helping the terminally ill to ‘cross the river’… a euphemism that explains how he also came to be the patron saint of ferrymen.
If you’re looking for a more suitable saint to intercede for psychos, I’d suggest Saint-Marie, the name of the island where Death In Paradise is set.
And we can now add Saint-Pierre-et- Miquelon, a string of islets off the Atlantic coast of Canada, where locals are bumped off weekly.
Saint-Pierre stars Josephine Jobert as the deputy chief of police, Genevieve ‘Arch’ Archambault. It rains a fair bit in Newfoundland, but Arch has found an anorak that doubles as a gabardine coat, so she can look like a detective and still stay dry.
Her new partner, Donny ‘Fitz’ Fitzpatrick, exiled to the islands after a scandal, hasn’t got the hang of the dress code. He sports a suit and sunglasses, to the hilarity of his bilingual colleagues. They mock him in French… until, inevitably, he reveals he understands every word.
Saint-PierreNew to town Inspector, Fitz joins forces with local detective Arch to solve the murder of a back-to-nature group leader
If you’re looking for a more suitable saint to intercede for psychos, I’d suggest Saint-Marie, the name of the island where Death In Paradise is set
The misfit-in-a-suit storyline has been the basis of Death In Paradise, of course, with a succession of leading men, ever since its beginning in 2011 with Ben Miller. There’s a dash of that here, as Fitz gets lost walking back to his lodgings and turns green every time he steps on a boat.
But the mainspring of the show is his ‘odd couple’ double act with Arch. She’s prickly, suspicious and wary of revealing her emotions. He’s intuitive, prone to sleepwalking, and missing his children after a messy break-up.
So far, there’s a grudging respect between them, and just a hint that each has noticed the other isn’t bad-looking.
Neither of them is exactly a supersleuth, though. While inspecting the corpse of a beekeeper, shot through the head
in a picturesque wooden church, they failed to notice the child spying on them until she made a bolt for it. And even then, they didn’t ask her if she’d seen the murder.
With shades of Shetland as well as Death In Paradise, this promising series has a dash of darkness to offset the cosy sweetness.
You’ll recognise Josephine from two stints on the Caribbean show, as DS Florence Cassell. Her character was permanently written out: pursued by vengeful drug traffickers, she entered the witness protection scheme and vanished.
Could Arch really be Florence under her new identity? They certainly look alike…
