Laura Donnelly leads the dark as DI Monica Kennedy in ITV’s serial killer drama, and her first discovery is a young man’s body in the countryside. The case quickly widens when Monica realises the dead man’s older brother went missing years before, giving the story a colder, more personal shape than a standard murder hunt.
Laura Donnelly and Helen Baxendale
Donnelly’s casting gives ITV a recognisable lead at the centre of a crime series that is built around place as much as plotting. Helen Baxendale also stars, keeping the focus on performance rather than procedural clutter, while the setting in the Scottish wilderness signals a production that wants atmosphere without turning the case into scenery.
Scottish wilderness, serial killer
The serial killer angle is the hook, but the series is careful about the usual crime-drama pattern. It is presented as a story about twisted techniques in the Scottish wilderness, yet the emphasis here is not on women being violently murdered, which shifts the tone away from a familiar template and toward the mechanics of the killings instead.
That choice makes the body on the ground more than an opening shock. Monica’s discovery of the older brother’s disappearance years earlier turns the case into a two-part mystery, with the missing-person thread likely to matter as much as the immediate death. For a prime-time ITV drama, that is the sharper commercial play: it offers the serial-killer engine, but with a case structure that can carry beyond a single kill.
Monday and the missing brother
The first episode continues on Monday, so the immediate next step is another piece of the investigation rather than a full reset. The useful question now is not whether the drama has a dark premise — it does — but how far the series will go in explaining those twisted techniques while keeping Monica’s search for the missing brother at the centre.
