Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock has a complicated life. She has a demanding career and a young son with a man who she’s clearly not in love with. She is also is having a passionate affair with her partner, who has his own wife and children. Essentially she has all the hallmarks of your typical hard bitten cop, except she’s a woman. When a schoolteacher is murdered in her town she takes on the case even though she has a long and complicated history with the victim, which ties in with the suicide of her teenage boyfriend. Bailey handles all these threads quite deftly but what’s missing is an emotional punch. Hard to feel sympathy for the victim when her stunning beauty is shoved in our faces so relentlessly, at the expense of any real sense of who she was. Never would have picked the murderer though, so well done there.
