THE SITE FOR DIE HARD CRIME & THRILLER FANS
FeaturesNews

Luther season 5 comes to BBC One

2 Mins read

Remember the time DCI John Luther handcuffed London crime boss George Cornelius to a radiator and pretty much left him there to rot? Well, that’s just one of the misdemeanours that’s going to come back to haunt the obsessive detective as the latest series of Luther begins at 9pm on New Year’s Day, on BBC One. Many more of his demons are to resurface as he investigates a spate of horrific murders.

The killings have come to the attention of Dr Vivien Lake, played by Hermione Norris, a psychiatrist who suspects one of her patients may be involved. Could she hold the clue Luther (Idris Elba) and his new partner DS Catherine Halliday (Wunmi Mosaku) need to connect the murders to a killer and solve the case?

Well, possibly, but things are going to get a lot more complicated in the meantime.

For a start, Cornelius is now looking for one of his sons who has disappeared and he gets his goons – The Spice Girls – to kidnap and torture Luther. He thinks the detective has something to do with it.

Even more significant is the reappearance of the elusive killer Alice Morgan, played by Ruth Wilson. Ever since the first series of the programme, Luther has been enthralled by this criminal mastermind. She is like a Moriarty to his Holmes and as much as he is infatuated with her, she is fascinated by him. When she commits a crime she always escapes him, and when it seemed she had been murdered in series 4, he couldn’t crack the case. Will season 5 offer the hope of closure?

Idris Elba as John Luther and Wunmi Mosaku Catherine Halliday.

The entire city seems to crackle with dark energy as Luther prowls it, and it’s this atmosphere that the show’s producers have dialled up as the stories have progressed. Whether malign or friendly, London’s residents are unpredictable and unstable and every scene has been shot in winter with grey skies and artificial light reflecting off its greasy-wet asphalt and brick textures. There is a comic book-style intensity to the visuals, the characters and the violence that even Frank Miller would find hard to match.

Dr Vivien Lake (Hermione Norris) gets cold feet when she thinks the killings relate to one of her patients.

Luther is also the ultimate binge-watching experience, and the BBC has dialled into that too, making series 1 through 4 available free as a box set on the iPlayer. (You better cash in before they’re taken away again.) To ramp up the intensity during the initial release of series 5, instead of a weekly episode, Luther will be shown on four consecutive nights starting 1 January.

Luther is written by British author Neil Cross, who now lives in New Zealand. You can order his standalone Luther novel, The Calling, here.


2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related posts
KindlePrintReviews

You Can’t Hurt Me by Emma Cook

This is Emma Cook’s first crime novel, but it arrives with the confidence of an accomplished author. And so it should, because although this standalone mystery is her first book of genre fiction, Cook is an experienced newspaper editor and author of several non-fiction works….
KindlePrintReviews

The Last Days of Johnny Nunn by Nick Triplow

Ever since his Brit grit debut, Frank’s Wild Years, Nick Triplow has been a favourite here at Crime Fiction Lover and in the British crime fiction community. One of the original organisers of the Hull Noir event, he has written a biography of inspirational North…
Features

Cleddau: New Welsh crime drama on iPlayer and S4C

Welsh crime fiction has really found its voice over the last decade, both on the page and with shows like Hinterland, Keeping Faith and Hidden bringing the Welsh culture, terrain and language to the small screen. The quiet, sultry mood; the wild hillsides and valleys;…
Crime Fiction Lover