In an isolated house in Monmouthshire, the wealthy Anchor-Ferrers family find themselves the victims of a psychopath’s cruel games, trapped and terrorised. Another adventure for Caffery, a protagonist much like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux or Paul Cleave’s Theo Tate, doomed to work "in the presence of evil." I spent a lot of the first episode wondering what was supposed to be so different about a series that seemed like a fairly stodgy murder mystery, and why most of the characters sounded as if they were speaking in translation. I spent the last 10 minutes thinking: I can’t believe I’m going to have to watch this whole thing to see if it’s going where I think it’s going. This is the sort of thriller that it is difficult to write about in advance without ruining it completely, but I will say that anyone who has watched some of these actors in previous roles may not be totally blindsided. Mo Hayder is a master of ratcheting up tension throughout a book—to the point that one must simply finish it before doing anything else. Such is the case with Wolf.”—George Easter, Deadly Pleasures (Rating: A-) We are soon into a world of conspiracy, snakes, teenage secrets, gruesome wounds, a hermit in the woods, a canine bellyful of jewellery, camp comedy, more snakes, a near-drowning, procedural police work, dream and nightmare sequences and voyeuristic torture scenes. (If you are not au fait with Hayder’s work, you should be warned that she liked to linger and this adaptation honours that commitment.) But there is never any explanation of what a donkey pitch is – unless, of course, I missed it as I fought to keep my head above the rising tide of absurdity.

Wolf - Penguin Books UK Wolf - Penguin Books UK

It really is a production rooted in Wales, making the most of our fabulous Welsh landscapes – and of course Welsh talent and crew. Juliet Anne Virginia Stevenson is known for her appearance in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply, a role in which she was nominated for the Bafta Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. As with the earlier books in the series, this really is a thriller worthy of its title, if you ignore the plot glitch, and will keep you on the edge of your seat all the way through. Quite where the flawed Caffery will go from here, I’m not quite sure – but along with a legion of others, I’m looking forward to finding out.She received a Lifetime Achievement prize at Women in Film And TV awards in 2018. Who else is in the cast?

Wolf based on a book? BBC One crime drama is adapted from Is Wolf based on a book? BBC One crime drama is adapted from

In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery. Meanwhile a wealthy local family is fighting for their lives, held hostage in their remote home. As their ordeal becomes increasingly bizarre and humiliating, the family begins to wonder: Is this really a random crime?

When the two narratives collide, it’s a thrilling, nail-biting and deeply disturbing race against time." Where is Wolf filmed? Perfectly and wonderfully paced, and imaginatively plotted and written . . . There are twists and turns aplenty here—not so many as to be confusing, but just enough to keep the reader reading incessantly from first sentence to last paragraph. . . . Read Wolf; you simply will never forgive yourself if you don’t.”—Joe Hartlaub, Bookreporter.com Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Two of the grisly murders that take place in Wolf (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC One) happen in an area called “the donkey pitch”. The murders are not inherently funny but every time a gnarled police officer or suited and booted detective speaks gravely of the donkey pitch murders, or what happened at the donkey pitch, I wondered if they might have been prudent to choose a less asinine location. To me, the word donkey is more goof than oof. In his professional life, Caffery is the sort of blunt, straight-talking copper who tells a victim of domestic violence that unless she reports her husband, she’ll end up a decomposing corpse and the coroner will have to do all sorts of grotesque things to her body. Just telling it like it is, babe. Caffery has recently returned to London from Cardiff, because of the brother and the unsolved disappearance and, as always with thrillers such as this, he’s gruff and private because there’s something we don’t know about what he left behind.