Humphrey Goodman spent a good few years solving crimes on the island of Saint-Marie, but left when he met the love of his life, Martha, to rejoin the Metropolitan police in London. Now they have relocated to Martha’s home town of Shipton Abbott in Devon, looking for a more peaceful life as they try and start a family.

Needless to say, Shipton Abbott has its fair share of local eccentrics to deal with, along with all manner of odd crimes to deal with. Well, I say “all manner”, as there’s one crime in particular that never seems to happen in the town…

When the first episode aired, a few people did ask me to review it, knowing how much I love Death In Paradise, the series that this is a spin-off from (in case you didn’t realise). I didn’t at the time for two reasons – firstly, I wanted to give the series a look at as a complete entity but also because I really didn’t know what to make of it. Because, dear reader, this is not simply Death In Paradise translated to the south west of England. And not least because of the lack of much “Death”.

I figured this was always going to be a little different, as by having the co-lead (Sally Bretton as Martha) having nothing to do with the investigation side of any plot, there would have to be other, more soap-opera-esque plots to involve her. Bretton and Kris Marshall do a very good job at the emotional stuff, with solid support from Barbara Flynn (Martha’s mum) and Jamie Bamber (Martha’s ex-boyfriend). There’s a decent arc throughout the series and while the resolution in the final episode is hardly a surprise (apart maybe for the location of it), it works well.

The police team is good value too. Zahra Ahmadi as DS Esther Williams is the focal point, an effective foil for Humphrey and Felicity Montague as Margo, the office manager, is great fun. Dylan Williams (Kelby) isn’t given much to do – basically every episode he doggedly finds a clue while not being particularly bright – but he does a good job with what he’s given.

However, here’s the sticking point. The producers – Tony Jordan and Robert Thorogood (although all the interviews I’ve seen have been with Jordan) – seem to have made a decision that the crimes are all going to be mostly small-scale. OK, there’s an off-screen sexual assault in one episode and one death which maybe could have been prevented, but generally we’re looking at odd occurrences – a family disappears from their cottage a la Mary Celeste for example – but generally with not a lot of harm done by the end of things. That’s not the problem, what the problem is that the “puzzles” are generally not desperately puzzling…

Now I know that I’m a dab hand at this sort of thing, but Death In Paradise often fools me, or misdirects me. Here, I don’t think the puzzle in any episode puzzled me for very long. Take the final episode, where evidence of a burglary points to an individual who was in the police cells at the time of the break-in. It’s a decent enough solution but with no effective misdirection or alternatives, the solution wasn’t hard to spot.

Credit though to one innovation, namely how the truth is explained by Humphrey. Given the nature of some of the stories, gathering the suspects would hardly work here, but the show recreates the events with Humphrey and Esther appearing in those events explaining what happened. It’s a really nice idea that works well.

So, all in all, it’s a diverting series with some charming leads. It certainly passes the time, but please, can we have something to tax the little grey cells a bit more next time?