If you love your French crime fiction, you’ll be in for a treat from 17 August 2026, when Channel 4 begins airing Everybody Lies, which will also be available to download via the broadcaster’s streaming service, Walter Presents.

The Parisienne crime author Olivier Norek is one of the co-creators of the show and you may be familiar with his gritty police procedurals such as Turf Wars and The Lost and the Damned, featuring the incorruptible Captaine Victor Coste. With Everybody Lies, you can expect something a little lighter than the Coste novels, although the main character, Vincent Verner (Vincent Elbaz), is just as incorruptible.

So much so, in fact, that he left his job as a detective in Paris when he pushed it too far investigating a well connected VIP in the city. Now he works for the ex-con Maximilien (Jackie Berroyer) in a second-hand bookshop where he specialises in putting the crime novels on the shelf in the wrong order. While the two are bickering about this, in walks Alice Mojodi (Miriama Gueye), a young prosecutor chosen to head up a new department, which will focus on sensitive cases like the one that railroaded Verner out of police work.

Predictably, Verner at first resists and his characteristic rudeness shows through. But soon he’s helping investigate the murder of an escort girl, killed in a property owned by a big automobile manufacturer. This isn’t a whodunnit. At the beginning of each two-part story in Everybody Lies, you get to see the crime take place. So it’s more a case of following the investigation and watching as the celebrity or powerful person involved tries to outwit Verner, Alice and their team who hound the culprit and accumulate evidence.

The first two episodes focus on the head of a major car company – a very wealthy man called Charles Favan (Nicolas Marié). He’s been trying to blackmail someone in the French ministry in charge of the environment and it has to do with vehicle emissions. Favan has a menacing fixer working for him, and there are layers of people he can manipulate to thwart the investigation.

However, Verner and Alice have the eager young detective Julien de Grève (Thomas Silberstein) working with them, striving to prove himself. And they have Malory Servaz (Joséphine de Meaux), a tech expert who takes care of phone hacking, surveillance and all that sort of jazz. As he’s working freelance for the Sensitive Cases Unit, Verner doesn’t have to follow police protocols and so the show isn’t really a police procedural. This also gives it scope to be a little more light hearted and eccentric. The lilting classical music adds a playful touch, too.

Somehow the victim’s friend Samantha (Léa Issert) also joins the team to help with the investigation. After all, she’s invested in the case.

Verner is outright rude at times, generally antisocial, and has a phobia about travel by car. However, he can be incredibly sensitive as well. One of the show’s strengths is how we see his relationships with the other characters develop, including his new neighbour – a single mother with a pre-teen son. It reminded me a little of Beck, but there’s also a touch of Department Q here. The sensitive cases unit is essentially a gang of misfits led by Alice, who it seems has been set up to fail, although as a team they ensure she’s successful. Maybe Verner has a bit of Carl Morck in him.

There’s also a touch of Astrid: Murder in Paris in the lightness of the mystery elements, the pacing and the peculiarities of Verner’s character. However, it’s not a high-powered policier like Spiral, nor does it pack the atmosphere of Witnesses, which was a great show.

Still, I found it very engaging and entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny in places. Like a strange, modern, French version of Columbo. Crime fiction lovers will truly enjoy Verner’s appreciation of the genre, and at one point the team is forced to relocate to the bookshop as their HQ. Verner tries to force customers to buy James Ellroy books, and one evening with Maximilien sets up to watch Bruno Cremer playing Maigret in a classic French detective show.

The second two-episode case involves the murder of woman sexually assaulted by a famous actor. In episodes five and six they pursue a water company executive responsible for polluting the environment, and the final pair of episodes becomes personal for Verner. You’ll have to wait and see about that one…

Everybody Lies originally aired as Tout le Monde Ment, four feature-length television programmes shown between 2022 and 2025.