In his professional life, Caffery is the sort of blunt, straight-talking copper who tells a victim of domestic violence that unless she reports her husband, she’ll end up a decomposing corpse and the coroner will have to do all sorts of grotesque things to her body. Just telling it like it is, babe. Caffery has recently returned to London from Cardiff, because of the brother and the unsolved disappearance and, as always with thrillers such as this, he’s gruff and private because there’s something we don’t know about what he left behind. Mo Hayder is a master of ratcheting up tension throughout a book—to the point that one must simply finish it before doing anything else. Such is the case with Wolf.”—George Easter, Deadly Pleasures (Rating: A-) When the two narratives collide, it’s a thrilling, nail-biting and deeply disturbing race against time." Where is Wolf filmed? In 2006, 13-year-old Tair Rada was found dead inside a bloodied toilet cubicle at school in Israel. This four-part documentary series, originally a hit on Netflix, follows events during the search for her killer and exposes flaws in the criminal justice system. It starts with the arrest of Roman Zadorov, a Ukrainian immigrant who worked at the school. HR Earth 9pm, BBC Two

WOLF | Kirkus Reviews WOLF | Kirkus Reviews

Perfectly and wonderfully paced, and imaginatively plotted and written . . . There are twists and turns aplenty here—not so many as to be confusing, but just enough to keep the reader reading incessantly from first sentence to last paragraph. . . . Read Wolf; you simply will never forgive yourself if you don’t.”—Joe Hartlaub, Bookreporter.com Juliet Anne Virginia Stevenson is known for her appearance in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply, a role in which she was nominated for the Bafta Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.Two of the grisly murders that take place in Wolf (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC One) happen in an area called “the donkey pitch”. The murders are not inherently funny but every time a gnarled police officer or suited and booted detective speaks gravely of the donkey pitch murders, or what happened at the donkey pitch, I wondered if they might have been prudent to choose a less asinine location. To me, the word donkey is more goof than oof. Meanwhile a wealthy local family is fighting for their lives, held hostage in their remote home. As their ordeal becomes increasingly bizarre and humiliating, the family begins to wonder: Is this really a random crime? In an isolated house in Monmouthshire, the wealthy Anchor-Ferrers family find themselves the victims of a psychopath’s cruel games, trapped and terrorised. I spent a lot of the first episode wondering what was supposed to be so different about a series that seemed like a fairly stodgy murder mystery, and why most of the characters sounded as if they were speaking in translation. I spent the last 10 minutes thinking: I can’t believe I’m going to have to watch this whole thing to see if it’s going where I think it’s going. This is the sort of thriller that it is difficult to write about in advance without ruining it completely, but I will say that anyone who has watched some of these actors in previous roles may not be totally blindsided.

Wolf ending explained: Who was the Donkey Pitch killer?

Meanwhile, a posh family – Matilda Anchor-Ferrers (Stevenson), her husband, Oliver (Teale), and their 22-year-old daughter, Lucia (Annes Elwy) – return from their flat in London to their enormous, isolated, signal-less house in Wales on the anniversary of the murders. They find the landline has been cut and a load of intestines from a freshly gutted something or other have been strung about the garden, as well as assorted other signs that scream: “GET OUT NOW, FOOLS!” (They don’t. OK, that is totally believable. Just stay. Fine.) As with the earlier books in the series, this really is a thriller worthy of its title, if you ignore the plot glitch, and will keep you on the edge of your seat all the way through. Quite where the flawed Caffery will go from here, I’m not quite sure – but along with a legion of others, I’m looking forward to finding out. It really is a production rooted in Wales, making the most of our fabulous Welsh landscapes – and of course Welsh talent and crew. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. The second, but dominating, hare is the Donkey Pitch murders in Monmouthshire, five years ago. No, I don’t know what a donkey pitch is. No, it is not explained at any of the approximately 3bn times the phrase is uttered over the six-hour series. Yes, it does jar every time. Yet, as the other wildnesses accumulate around it, the name seems almost to have been intended as a warning of the repeated tonal inconsistencies to come; in a strange, twisted way, it becomes a point of stability in an increasingly roiling sea. He is best known for playing FBI psychiatrist Dr Robert Borden on the American television series Blindspot. Mo Hayder’s jobs included filmmaker, Tokyo nightclub hostess, and English language teacher in Asia. She was also the author of Birdman; The Treatment; The Devil of Nanking, winner of the Elle Magazine crime fiction prize; Pig Island, shortlisted for the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel; Ritual, shortlisted both for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award and for the coveted Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award; Skin; and Gone; as well as the winner of the 2011 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award for outstanding body of work. She passed away in 2021 at the age of 59. Another adventure for Caffery, a protagonist much like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux or Paul Cleave’s Theo Tate, doomed to work "in the presence of evil."