Channel 4 and Walter Presents have set a new destination on our crime drama map. From Friday 13 June, you’ll be able to stream your way to Bolzano, a city high in the Italian Alps, where a serial killer has emerged from dormancy and an underachieving assistant prosecutor finally gets the chance to prove herself – to her superiors, and to her legal eagle father.

Beautiful as the setting may be, with the crisp mountain air, snowcapped peaks and cobbled streets, Bolzano has a problem. People are scared. After watching an ice hockey game in the bar with his friends, a man called Hans Meier is shot by a masked assailant, in the alleyway leading to his door. His dog is killed at the same time. A metal sacre coeur is placed on his chest – it’s the mark of The Monster, a serial killer who terrorised the city a few year ago but then disappeared.

Ava Kofler (Elena Radonicich) is an assistant prosecutor whose father Gerhard (Richard Sammel) used to be the chief prosecutor for the region. Ava’s surprised to receive the Meier murder but her boss doesn’t want to draw attention to the case by giving it to a more senior attorney. The first 20 minutes of episode one are intriguing to watch as Ava meets her police colleagues and blunders her way into the case. She thinks she has it solved… but there’s a huge twist right up front. Perfect!

Though it gets off to a fast start, Pale Mountains is actually a detailed procedural. Ava might have spent her first day on the case diving deep into the five previous murders carried out by The Monster, but like many detectives in the genre she went on gut instinct. The Monster kills using a World War I Italian pistol. They don’t even make bullets for this type of gun any more, so they’re using modified Colt 45 ammunition. More importantly, the killer targets German speakers. And the sacre coeur? That links The Monster to South Tyrol separatist terrorists who lit the city on fire back in the 1960s.

When Ava applies the brakes, she meets Paolo Costa (Matteo Martari), the police detective who investigated the earlier Monster killings. He worked for Ava’s father and there’s bad blood between them, though jointly they failed to solve the case. These days, Costa is a shell of a man, on special leave from the force after a horrific car accident, which occurred when he was trying to chase down The Monster on a mountain road. Another colleague was killed and Costa has lost a leg.

Then, an Italian couple are attacked in broad daylight – the man ducks but his wife is shot and ends up on life support. The gun and the bullets are the same, but for Costa this is well outside of The Monster’s MO. It seems something else is going on in Bolzano, but as viewers we know that Ava Kofler and Paolo Costa are being watched, and there’s a sinister character lurking on the edge of town, in an old house by the frozen lake…

Filmed in the Dolomites, Pale Mountains has something different to offer. Lots of crime shows deal with ethnic conflict, but nowadays usually this involves immigration. Here, it seems that people from two distinct European cultures – Italian and German speakers – are coming into conflict. Equally, people from both cultures are collaborating to solve the crime – Ava being from a German background while Paolo’s is Italian.

The show’s impetus comes not just from the hunt for The Monster, but from the developing relationship between them. He embarrasses her early on, and later she embarrasses him. There’s the friction between Paolo and Gerhard to factor in as well. But our protagonists have similarities too. Both will act on impulse. And both feel as though their lives are missing something. Ava is lonely in her marriage. Paolo is dealing with the trauma of his accident.

Another difference is the length of the episodes. The overarching story takes place across four two-hour episodes, with other cases and sub-plots woven in. Ava’s father is developing Alzheimer’s, and she has a daughter out there somewhere. She gave the child up for adoption. There’s an art theft to investigate, but the bigger story is that of The Monster – and the closer they get, the greater the peril. Plus, someone close to them can’t be trusted…

All four episodes will be available to stream from 13 June, and on 16 June Channel 4 will be broadcasting the first episode in the UK. It’s also available on Walter Presents via PBS in the United States. In Italy, the programme was broadcast on Rai under the title Brennero in September 2024.