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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Midsomer Murders: Tainted Fruit starts as DCI Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) & Sgt. Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey) are called to the small village of Midsomer Malham where local millionaire Archie Townsend (Terence Harvey) has reported several threatening letters sent to his snobbish & arrogant yet beautiful young daughter Melissa (Lucy Punch). The letters threaten her life & refer to the death of an old man named Neil who died of pneumonia in Melissa's rundown dilapidated leaking cottage she refused to get fixed up, the person who sent the letters think that Melissa is responsible for Neil's untimely death. Then the local vet's is broken into & several powerful & potentially lethal drugs are stolen & shortly after the dead body of Melissa is found with a syringe in her stomach having been pumped full of the stolen drugs. With Melissa dead, the person he was supposed to be protecting, Barnaby has to get to the bottom of all the usual lies, affairs & local gossip to solve a vicious murder but as he investigates there appears to be no shortage of suspects...Episode 6 from season 4 this Midsomer Murders mystery was the final episode from the fourth season & was directed by Peter Smith & I have to say it's a blessing going back to an early Midsomer Murders episode after a fairly lacklustre couple of more recent seasons. As a fan of the series I have been watching some of the more recent episodes lately as they premiere on telly over here in the UK & by a complete coincidence the previous Midsomer Murders episode that I watched before Tainted Fruit was Down Among the Dead Men (2006) from season nine & strangely both have exactly the same basic plots & motives for murder except they are reversed. In Down Among the Dead Men a guy is killed for what initially looks like because he was blackmailing someone but turns out to be more a case of revenge for past events yet in Tainted Fruit the girl is murdered for what initially looks like revenge but actually turns out because she was blackmailing someone! Spooky eh? To be honest I doubt I would ever have noted the similarities if I hadn't seen them both within the space of a day though. Compre Tainted Fruit to Down Among the Dead Men & there's a big difference in terms of raw basic storytelling, in Tainted Fruit there is so much more going on, the plot is far more intriguing & has far more twists, turns & red herrings, the chemistry between Barnaby & the somewhat bumbling Troy is so much better than his subsequent partners with some fairly amusing banter between the two & I didn't have a bloody clue who did it right up until the end! In fact the final thirty odd minutes has all sorts of twists & turns & you need to pay attention as all the little clues come together & all the little incidents that at first seemed insignificant like the Wellington Boots, the car crash, Adam's phone call, the letters & all manner of clues that come together for a suitably over the top & extravagant motive for multiple murder involving lesbians, drunks, high society & blackmail. In fact it felt like there was more incident in Tainted Fuit than just about the entire last couple of seasons put together! By the way, if you are interested the title Tainted Fruit refers to a rather cynical ending in a metaphorical sense rather than a literal meaning.Even the pacing is noticeably much better here, the episode starts with Barnaby's investigation into the letters before Meliisa is killed which gets into the crime mystery drama aspect right off the bat & then there are three evenly spread out murders to keep things moving along. The murder scenes are very good in this, I particularly liked all the point-of-view shots from the killer's perspective & we just see their black gloved hands go about their murderous business filling syringes up with deadly drugs or searching through a tool shed & various large hacksaw's (& there's even a chainsaw seen in the background as well) trying to find what they want in pure Italian Giallo film fashion, Dario Argento eat your heart out! As usual the photography is nice & the locations are just so quintessentially English with the Twonsend's stately home in Oxfordshire going on to appear in the series again as the 'Feathers Hotel' in Market for Murder (2002) from season five. I particularly liked the atmospheric opening sequence as the camera pans across a graveyard late at night as it pours down that looks like it could have come straight from any Hammer Horror film.Tainted Fruit is a great Midsomer Murders episode full of intrigue, mystery, twists, great killer-cam photography, a clever plot that while suitably over the top & memorable works & really does show up some of the latter strictly by-the-numbers episodes of this series that we have been treated to recently.
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