Summer of 1936 on the French Riviera. Factory workers have just gained a two-week, annual, paid vacation, so we've got a bunch of proles as well as the usual gang of swells in town. Our girl is also here, just graduated from the police academy and assigned to this out of the way place on her request. It also happens to be where her father is locked up awaiting his upcoming execution for murder, a murder his daughter is sure he did not commit. She's trying to do her job, and trying to find evidence to clear her father without letting her boss know that she is her father's daughter. And then we get swells being murdered, one after another, at the fancy hotel, so the cops have got their hands full.
Very entertaining in an Agatha Christie kind of way.
P. S. In French. Execution is be done using a guillotine. From Wikipedia:
After its adoption, the device remained France's standard method of judicial execution until the abolition of capital punishment in 1981. The last person to be executed by a government via guillotine was Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian murderer, on 10 September 1977 in France.
Tagusari Brothers is a Japanese crime drama starring Masaki Okada and Shota Sometani. The story follows two brothers who join the police as a detective and a medical examiner. Acting as police officers, in each episode they investigate a new murder. On their own, they continue to try and unravel the mystery of their parent's murder that happened thirty years ago. Curious characters, curious cases.
Why have they waited this long to start investigating this crime? Near as I can tell, they were prompted by a new law that declared a statue of limitations on crimes committed before some date, or after some date, I was never clear about exactly what changed. In any case it was enough to prompt these two to start investigating their parents murder. They didn't start before then because the police were investigating and the brothers, being good Japanese citizens, do what they are told and leave the investigation to the police. This unquestioned faith in the police is exactly what got their father killed.
Their father worked in a machine shop. One of his coworkers has a wife who needs an expensive operation, so he takes on a side job of making some guns for the local mafia. The guns are made and they just need to be delivered. Right then, the sick wife collapses at the machine shop. The coworker entrusts delivery of the package to the boy's father. Everything would have been fine as long as the father doesn't open the package, but he does, and then he compounds his error telling everyone within earshot that he is going to report this to the police. The mafia is not happy and so mark him for execution.
It turns out that when the assassin arrives to kill the parents, they are already dead, or on their way, having been poisoned. The assassin knows nothing of the poison and the parents are still breathing, so the assassin follows through on his mission and kills them.
So who poisoned the parents? The pawnshop owner. Her father was also killed by the mafia because the gun deal went bad. Seems a little extreme, but maybe dealing in guns makes people super paranoid.
No trailer, but here's a couple of items of interest.
Delhi Crime: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Shefali Shah, Huma Qureshi, Rasika Dugal | Netflix
Netflix India
The third season of Delhi Crime moves away from its primary Delhi focus, following a sprawling, interstate investigation into a brutal human trafficking network that targets vulnerable young girls across India.
Badi Didi is a 30-ish woman who runs this smuggling operation. She gathers up young women (15 to 18 years old) and ships them to John Ji, who I thought was in Thailand but I may have got that wrong. He may just be somewhere around Bombay. The story Badi Didi is telling the girls is that they are going to get good jobs, like maid or waiter, but the implication is they are being sold into sexual slavery. I mean every way point on their journey to Badi Didi is a brothel. On the other hand all the girls speak English and apparently have passports. I'm pretty sure you don't need to speak English in order to have sex, so maybe they aren't being sold into sexual slavery, but maybe they are being sold into call center slavery.
Finished the series last night and this morning I see this on the Daily Wire:
The FBI recently took out a massive internet scam network, arresting over 300 people, freeing over 2,000 people from human trafficking, and seizing over $8 billion in cryptocurrency.
The FBI said last week that it primarily focused on taking down what it calls “scam compounds” in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The scam compounds are typically guarded and filled with trafficked workers who are forced to conduct romance scams and fake investment schemes that target many Americans. Over 2,000 people were freed from the compounds.
The operation focused on Prince Holding Group, a company in Cambodia. Authorities also took out a criminal compound in Dubai, Myanmar, and Thailand. Altogether, the FBI seized over 127,000 bitcoin from the nine scam compounds, which is over $8 billion, making it the largest crypto seizure in human history.
Handsome young policeman, son of police big shot, moves to small town where he teams up with a 20 year veteran. Shortly thereafter there is a murder, a murder in a small town where there hasn't been a murder in 20 years. The story centers on the staff of the local Manyang police substation. Note: Manyang is not the same as Munju.
Characters. All men unless otherwise noted.
Lee Dong-sik - A local detective whose life was turned upside down when his sister disappeared 20 years ago,
Han Joo-won - A young, handsome detective, son of the Assistant Director of the National Police Force.
Park Jeong-je - A captain at the Manyang substation and Dong-sik's childhood friend.
Yoo Jae-yi (woman) - The hardworking operator and manager of the Manyang butcher shop and restaurant.
Nam Sang-bae - The chief of the Manyang police substation, nearing the end of his career.
Oh Ji-hwa (woman) - Head of the violent crimes team at the Munju Police Station. Previously married to:
Lee Chang-jin - The CEO of the JL Construction company, heavily involved in local development projects. Previously married to Oh Ji-hwa. Slimy thug. You despise him as soon as he opens his mouth.
The grocer, apparently not too smart, and he has a stutter.
Han Joo-won's father, big shot in the national police force.
Park Jeong-je's mother, local politician.
Several women victims.
Very slow paced story of horrific serial killer in a small town in Korea. It starts with the discovery of a body. The investigation goes very slowly for the first 7 or 8 episodes, mostly we have everyone suspecting everyone else. They the investigation starts getting results. Eventually the whole story is revealed.
The story starts 20 years ago when the sister of a local policeman, Lee Dong-sik, discovers their neighbor, the grocer attempting to dispose of the body of a woman he has killed. He, being the demented son-of-a-bitch that he is, cuts off the tips of her fingers. She manages to escape from his clutches and runs down the road looking for help. The chief of police (who will be Han's father), driving home drunk after a late night party with his two partners, hits her and kills her. He calls his partner, Lee Chang-jin, to come help him clean up the mess. The Chang-jin shows up, takes charge, and the chief leaves. Chang-jin doesn't do anything, he leaves the body in the middle of the road. Not too much later, a teenage boy, Park Jeong-je, also drunk, comes down the same road and runs over the body. He calls his mom, who is the chief's other partner. She calls Chang-jin and he comes out to this same scene, again. He loads the body in his car, but then . . . something happens, I don't recall exactly what . . . and when he gets back the body is gone. The grocer has finally caught up with his victim. He carts her off, takes her back to her house (not his house) and walls her up in a concrete block wall next to the boiler, which he repaired. This repair must have been going on at the same time in order for his working in the basement to go unremarked.
Now everyone clams up and the murder goes unsolved for 20 years. The dead girl's brother, Lee Dong-sik, is now an inspector with the local police department. Chang-jin has become a developer and Park Jeong-je's mother is running for mayor. The chief of police (Han's father) is now the deputy director of the national police force. His son, Han, has joined the police. As part of all cops early service, they need to spend some time in a rural district, so he gets transferred to this same small town.
He's a good looking guy, but he's got some minor psychological problems. He's hyper-sensitive about cleanliness, his personal space and the letter of the law. He seems to be a good cop, but it takes him forever to respond to anyone talking to him. Or maybe that's just the director wanting to keep his pretty face on the screen for a while. He seems to be pretty smart, but these long delays make him look kind of stupid, so what's the deal?
Now another body shows up. Actually, it's the first one the grocer killed. It was buried in the swamp 20 years ago but has worked its way to the surface. Her fingertips have also been cut off, which leads to suspicion that it might be the cop's missing sister, but DNA evidence shows that it is not her.
Dong-sik and Han have both been collecting missing persons reports and they have about a dozen reports of women about 30 years old who have gone missing. This new dead body spurs them to do some more digging. They spend a good deal of time suspecting each other over the flimsiest of circumstances. Can't say as I blame them since they don't have any other evidence.
Now the grocer kills his 20 year old daughter. Evidently, 20 years ago, a hooker got pregnant and then latched onto the grocer who marries her. The hooker gives birth, leaves the baby with the grocer and runs off. Now the grocer embarks on a 20 year campaign of revenge, killing hookers and burying them in a field. The baby grows up to be an irresponsible brat. Both the grocer and the kid suspect he is not her father. Eventually her behavior sends him over the edge and he kills her. Now his whole sordid tale unravels.
The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Very creepy, very frustrating. We've got a stalker who surreptitiously makes video recordings of people and then sends them those recordings along with bits of a nursery rhyme. Once they are well on edge, our stalker sneaks in, kills them and then slips away, often just seconds before our hero cops appear. Bodies start piling up, and then they start hitting closer to home, so now we're super motivated to find this scum bag, and find them we do.
The climax was a bit irritating. Our big and strong hero Hess has finally tracked down the villain, a slightly built woman, but he doesn't have a positive ID yet, so she's just a suspect. But she ain't waiting for the handcuffs, she makes a surprise attack on our boy with an ax, doesn't connect with the ax, but manages to knock him to the ground. While he's on the ground she manages to give him a big ax whack in his leg. There is a tussle and he manages to get back on his feet and runs away to the bog. Who knows how people's brains react under stress, but I can tell you from the comfort of my armchair that was the wrong thing to do. He should have dealt with this woman here and now. Of course he doesn't have his gun because he's been suspended. Of course he has, dramatic cop shows, you know.
We only watched the first couple of episodes and then we had had enough of these people. I'm only posting this because I laid all the ground work when we started watching it and I'm cleaning out my drafts folder.
Love & Death is a 7-episode true-crime drama miniseries, now streaming on Netflix as of December 2025, that chronicles the 1980 killing of Betty Gore by Candy Montgomery in Texas. Starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons, the show follows a suburban affair that turns deadly, leading to a high-profile murder trial. - Google
Kohrra: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Mona Singh, Barun Sobti | Netflix India
Netflix India
India is a strange place. On one hand they have an elite subculture that has adopted many Western ways. On the other hand the vast majority of the country is totally enthralled with their infinitely long tradition of being Indian. Makes trying to enforce the Western idea of law and order a very iffy proposition.
No trailer. Another very slow paced show, mostly about people dealing with the after effects of violent crime. Leading characters are all likable, actor portraying the villain does a good job making him reprehensible.
Four kids, maybe 12 years old, go out in the woods after school, even though they've been warned there is an armed criminal on the loose. They discover one kid's father, a policeman, dead on the ground. He and the criminal shot each other and both are dead. The pick up the cops gun, put it in a cooler, and bury it.
23 years later all four are back in the same town and the manager of a grocery store is shot and killed. Forensic evidence says the gun that was used to kill him is the dead policeman's gun, the one who was killed 23 years ago. The four kids go dig up their 'time capsule' and discover the gun is missing.
Three of the four have possible motives for killing the manager, and their alibis are terrible. Nobody can tell the truth, for reasons. Place your bets on who's guilty and who gets blamed.
Eventually, the guy and girl get together and all is well.
Watch Someone Has To Know | Netflix Official Site
NITFLIXZ
Someone Has to Know is a 2026 Chilean crime-drama series inspired by the 1999 disappearance of Jorge Matute Johns. Not your usual murder mystery, this one is all about misery, persistence, and never finding out what happened.
When her son Julio (Clemente Rodriguez) disappears during a wild night out with friends, Vanessa Font (Paulina García) places her trust in the justice system and her local community to bring him home. The investigator in charge, Detective Montero (Alfredo Castro), thinks they’ll have the case wrapped up in a matter of days. After all, hundreds of people saw the missing teen at the nightclub he and his friends frequented. But Vanessa’s hope turns to rage when each lead — a shady nightclub owner accused of running a trafficking business, a mute witness who claims to have seen Julio’s violent abduction, and a priest who refuses to break his vow of confidentiality — turns into a dead end. Someone knows what happened to her beloved son, and she’ll chase the truth until the bitter end — even if it takes decades.
The mother makes enough noise that a squad of six police are assigned to the case for over a year. They only learned that the kid had died when the mother asked the priest to make an official prayer of some sort, and the priest refused. We can only surmise that she was asking that her son be returned to her live and well, and the priest knew that was not going to happen because he knew the kid was dead. The priest is the most interesting character in this story.
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Very funny. 3 squirrely women go to a small town in Ireland to attend a funeral for their friend. Except their friend isn't dead, but somebody else is. There is some nefarious scheme running in the background, but our three dames can't figure out 1) if they want to do anything about it, and 2) what they should do if they do want to do anything about it, so they spend a lot of time arguing about what they should do, or not. Hijinks ensue.
Gangs of Galicia: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Our girl, Ana, the female lawyer, has been in Madrid for the last three or four years, raising her daughter, the daughter that was fathered by Daniel, the son of the Padin patriarch that runs the Galicia drug smuggling empire. Ana and Daniel are our Romeo and Juliet. He's been in jail for the last three or four years and has just been let out on account of they haven't gotten around to holding his trial. The trial may still happen, but for now at least, he's out.
Ana left Galicia on bad terms with some people, Now in order to make amends, she offers to go to work for a Columbian drug smuggler, setting up a lab to process their drug, which doesn't make a lot of sense, unless maybe they were just doing packaging, but it sure looked more complicated than that with screens being dipped into tubs full of liquid. I mean, I can understand setting up a packaging operation. The drugs (heroin or cocaine) come in lots of hundreds of kilogram size blocks that each need to be cut into at least a couple of thousand pieces for retail delivery. But a lab for producing heroin or cocaine doesn't make much sense. The raw material would be much bulkier which is going to make shipment more difficult. Then again, maybe they were making a totally artificial drug like meth or fentanyl. But in that case I think you would need like full-on hazmat suits and respirators. Or maybe losing a few factory workers isn't a problem. Or maybe I wasn't watching that closely.
Anyway, the Columbian is conspiring with Paco (Luis Zahera - famous to me for his role as Ezequiel in the Netflix series Wrong Side of the Tracks) to take down the Padins. To do this they setup an elaborate trap. When a shipment of drugs comes in, it gets manhandled from the go-fast boat to a waiting van. This happens in a matter of minutes and then the van and the boat disappear into the night. On this night though, the Columbian gets tipped off and sends a squad of fake policemen to raid the scene and snag the van as it was driving away. Now Paco and the Columbian start selling off portions of their haul. Naturally the Padins find out about it, and go raid the warehouse where the Columbians stashed the drugs. The Columbian has been waiting for this - he has lookouts watching the warehouse. When they spot the Padin crew approaching, they call the cops who swoop down and arrest Nilo, Daniel's best bud.
Now things start to unravel all around. I think all of the shooting was confined to the 9th episode, and there was a bunch. Naturally all the principal players survive so we can have another season. Maybe.
Why is the Colombian from Brazil? Maybe because Colombia doesn't have any seaports on the Atlantic Ocean. Umm, no. Colombia's busiest seaports are on their Atlantic coast. Maybe because Brazil is a thousand miles closer, or maybe northern Brazil drug enforcement is not as formidable as what you find in urban Colombia.
Pretty great show. Very complicated revenge plot. Willy, an effeminate theater director finds out his wife is still exchanging love letters with Martin (a guy she had an affair with like 20 years ago) and loses his mind. He contrives a scheme to make Martin look like a serial killer, but in fact kills all the victims himself.
Meanwhile, we have a very nasty villain, Tom Waaler, a dirty cop. He is a member of a right-wing death squad, illegally importing weapons. Unfortunately, his source for the weapons is Martin, the same guy Willy is trying to frame for murders.
Occasionally, someone will come across Tom (the dirty cop) doing dirty deeds and Tom kills them. So we have two killers running around loose. Harry sorts it all out.
The framing of the smuggler goes very well, the guy is arrested and the coppers think they have a solid case. But something about it bugs Harry. He explains it to his boss that 'it felt right, but it didn't feel genuine'.
There are a couple of gory scenes, one in a very sleazy public restroom and another in an elevator. Seems like the makeup artists are always trying to outdo each other. Does this level of gore boost their audience numbers? I suppose it must. I think I prefer the old English style of bloodless murder mysteries.
P. S. Martin comes from Prague to visit his mother in Oslo on a regular basis. She lives in this house:
Martin's mother's house
The house is situated in a railyard in Oslo, or so it would appear in the show. Looks like it might be an antique railway station, carefully preserved. However a close inspection of the railyard in Oslo shows no such house. Google could not identify it, other than to say it was 'in the German style'. So, AI. Still, a pretty nice house. Except for being in the middle of a railyard.
The Art of Sarah | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]
Netflix K-Content
Entertaining Korean murder mystery. Silly girls, lusting after designer goods that cost more than their annual salary.
Google summary:
The Art of Sarah (2026) is a Netflix South Korean mystery thriller starring Shin Hye-sun as a woman who constructs a fraudulent identity to enter high society, only to be found "dead" while detective Park Mu-gyeong (Lee Joon-hyuk) uncovers her web of lies. It explores themes of class, deception, and the construction of identity, highlighting the gap between reality and fabricated, luxury-focused personas.
While I was recovering from hip surgery I have accumulated a backlog of Netflix reviews. I'm trying to clear them out, but inspired writing is in short supply, so I'm asking Google for help.
Official Trailer】Unveil: Jadewind: The mysterious veil will eventually be unveiled by me!💥😎| YOUKU
YOUKU English-Get APP now
This show is a little odd. The characters are like something out of a comic book. The sets are fabulous. Our girl and her intellectual sidekick investigate murders in and around the imperial palace. Every murder starts out looking like a simple case but they all become more twisted as they look into them.
The first case involves an illegal brothel where rich, powerful men are abusing young women. There is one guy who seems to be at the center of this. He knows who all the players are, but he dies. Does this sound like Epstein's island or what?
The more our girl looks into these cases, the more she runs into political roadblocks. Now that I think about it, this is exactly what's going on in our own government. We hear about all this malfeasance but no charges are ever laid, and certainly no one is ever convicted.
The sets are so great I looked into it. See what I found:
The World's Largest Film Studio Is Home to 30,000 Actors
Goldthread
The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 4 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
They really fell down on this one. It's like 90% of the show is about women commiserating about 'poor, poor' Mickey Haller. Christ on a crutch. It doesn't move along like the older seasons did, the pace is glacial. I suspect the show has been infected by the Harlan Cobendisease.
That said, there is a good scene near the end of episode eight where Cisco is leaving a high rise hotel after having served a subpoena to a gangster. Previously Cisco had been beat up by a couple of thugs who caught him snooping around the gangster's previous hotel, so when he sees a couple of thugs in the hotel lobby while he is on his way out, he gives them a wide berth. But as he is walking across the parking lot to his car, he realizes that the reason the gangster freaked out when Cisco showed up at this door is not because of the subpoena (he doesn't give a fig for the subpoena), but rather because he is afraid of somebody else, somebody else who has sent those two thugs he saw in the lobby, who were headed to the elevators. About the time we see the light in Cisco's eyes when he realizes this, we also see the gangster falling from his eighth floor window in the hotel. He lands right on the top of a car with a satisfying smash. He was a villain, after all.
In episode 10 we have a scene where the whole debacle is wrapped up in the Judge's chambers. Besides the prosecutor and Mickey, we've got the county Sheriff, a couple of FBI agents and somebody higher up in some local government office. The FBI won't let out any information that would exonerate Mickey because it would compromise their investigation of a nationwide biofuel fraud operation. You kind of get the idea of how difficult it is for the FBI to make these kind of cases.
The show also lays out how the biofuel fraud worked, and it was easy as pie. All you have to do it lie and the government starts pouring money into your pocket. No wonder the Somali's in Minnesota managed to make off with so much loot. Nobody is watching the effing store.
Kind of a stupid show, full of catty women being catty. All the evidence for the murder points to the lead detective, Jack, and so far (3 episodes in) he has managed to conceal his total involvement with the victim. Did he kill her? Don't know but he's such a jerk that I don't really care. But now we've got a second murder victim, so go ahead and place your bets on who's the killer. That's the only reason to keep watching it is to find out who dunnit. Also, my wife seems to be enjoying it, and a couple of hours of Netflix does sooth my addled mind.
The ending almost makes it worthwhile. At the end our list of suspects has narrowed down to two women, and it kind of looks like one of them is the killer. But then the real killer is unveiled, and it's a person who has been there all along, but just kind of in the background, floating around the edges.
DARK Season 1 Official Trailer # 2 (2017) Netflix Mystery TV Series HD
ONE Media
Feels like we have seen this show before. We've got a rainy, dark, forest, the small town of Winden, Germany, a smattering of school kids, big and little, and two missing kids. We've also got animals inexplicably falling dead, electric lights being flaky, a mysterious cave adjacent to a nuclear power plant and a mad scientist conducting weird experiments.
Winden is about ten miles from the French border. There is a nuclear power plant 18 miles northeast of Winden.
Realized after the first episode that we had started watching it once before, but found that the story line included time-travel, and being as the boss was opposed to anything science-fictiony, we turned it off. I'm not a big fan of time travel, but some time travel stories are pretty good even though they are fundamentally ridiculous.
This one is just confusing. We've got a dozen or so characters, but we have them operating in three different times periods, so we have three different actors playing each character, one for each time period, which makes it challenging to keep the characters straight, never mind the plot. Wikipedia has a good cast listing.
Did I mention it's rainy? And dark? And the music is creepy. (Soundtrack) The whole show has a very creepy vibe. And because most of our characters are confused and upset, they spend an awful lot of time out wandering around in the rain without umbrellas or even hats. Amazingly, nobody dies of pneumonia.
One good thing is the elaborate clockwork time machine. We catch glimpses of it early on, but we finally get a good look at in the last episode.
Murder in Bjäre Sweden, a small farming community. You never met such a bunch of disagreeable people. We've got two brothers, farmers, both dying, one in bed, one still on his feet, their wives, kids and associated hangers-on-ers. One farmer inherited 300 acres from his father, the other one got some pigs and machinery. The 300 acres, known as Synland, or the land of sin, is constantly referred to as being worthless, but it brings in grant money from the European Union every year and evidently it's enough to cause some friction. Some kind of serious disconnect here that 300 acres can be worthless, but hey, TV.
The older kids, both the farmer's and our girl's, are messing around with drugs, and one of them gets into hot water with the local drug kingpin over a missing $30K. Because nobody is talking to the police it takes forever to find this out.
Our girl is a single mom. Her son is a real jerk, I mean typical teenager, and she ends up having to arrest him for murder. Needless to say, this puts an additional strain on their relationship. Did he do it? In a way he is responsible, but no, he didn't actually kill anyone.
Funny that nobody knows the name of the actor who plays the major villain. P. S. Just remembered that the blacksmith looked familiar, but he doesn't show up in the cast either. Bah.
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