Anyone who turns up to breakfast with no shirt, and betrays a woman so far out of his league it’s not funny, deserves jail time.Total solar eclipses are a happy accident of nature. My hope is that Romain will be convicted for murdering his wife’s mother, conspiring to siphon off the Garnier fortune and ruining a perfectly good lunch. It won’t be the British behind this crime wave, obviously, though surely they could be jailed for something. Nor among the Marseillais, whose stirringly gritty city has been airbrushed from this drama in favour of such Instagrammable property porn that by episode five the murder suspects will most likely include an British couple doing up the local chateau for a Channel 4 series. The Red Shadows was a hit last year in France, chiefly, you would think, among viewers who unironically wear sweaters knotted over their shoulders – but not, most likely, among those demonstrating against police violence in Paris recently. I’m no cop, but surely posing in decorous silhouette inside the sniper’s crosshairs and pointing your piece heavenwards is asking for trouble. The guests dive for cover, except for Aurore who races towards the gunfire, shooting first and asking questions never. Bullets rake wine glasses with a culinary philistinism that indicates the shooter in the undergrowth is not French. The fact that Pasco called her mobile a week before he died certainly makes Aurore’s eyebrow rise into a questioning circumflex.īefore we can test this hypothesis, lunch is not served. Perhaps, despite a DNA test proving otherwise, Clara is a gold-digging impostor bent on snaffling the Garnier family fortune. They are bunch of stereotypes right down to the obligatory bratty teen, the lemon-sucking patriarch grandad, a cravat-wearing wine bore of an uncle, and a nautical cove of a dad who may well have won Marseille’s Captain Birdseye lookalike contest five years straight. She is invited to France to meet the Garnier family at a lavish lunch on the biggest terrace in the Bouches-du-Rhône department. The girls’ mother was murdered 25 years ago by gangsters who later kidnapped Clara during a botched ransom exchange.Īfter some natty detective work, Aurore tracks Clara (Manon Azem) down in Italy.
A photo in the package matches the image onscreen of her long-lost sister, Clara.
Towards the stars and then the shadows software#
Happily, we don’t have to.īack at the station, Aurore fires up the age-progression software on her computer. Like Line of Duty or Law and Order, it takes itself rather seriously. Who put him there and why? And what is inside the package that the gun-toting villain nicked from Pasco’s pad and then conveniently dropped as he scarpered from Aurore’s flying bullets? Most importantly, where did Aurore learn to strike that fetching silhouette whenever she points her service revolver? Not at Hendon.Īt such moments, and there are lots of them, The Red Shadows is funny, but not intentionally so. The dead man in her murder case, a shady procurer called Pasco Vasquez, had been found in a shallow grave overlooking Marseilles. She’s got Katarina Johnson-Thompson’s physique, Columbo’s detecting nous and Prince Andrew’s glands.
When we first see her she’s just finishing a 20km morning run without breaking sweat. She’s Cagney, Lacey, Juliet Bravo and Spiral’s Laure Berthaud rolled into one. Happily, Aurore is more than a wronged woman. Romain is having it off with his boss at the local police station while his wife is next door selflessly working both a homicide and the case of her own missing sister. It also means their sister – and our hero – Aurore (Nadia Farès) might afford a decent sofa bed for those nights when she can’t bear to sleep with Romain, her buff, philandering louse of a husband and fellow cop.
The proceeds might also cheer up Fred, his uptight suit of a hotel manager brother. Good news for badass biker Gabriel Garnier and his designer stubble, since his share will pay off the loan sharks. The Garnier family is selling this estate for €40m.
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