The Winbury estate in Nantucket is the location for a lavish family wedding – Amelia Sacks is marrying Benji Winbury, the middle son of the “happy” family. All of the Winburys, Amelia’s parents and assorted friends have gathered for the pre-wedding festivities but after the rehearsal dinner, someone is found dead on the beach.

As the family, led by matriarch Greer, move to protect the family’s perfect reputation, it becomes clear to Amelia that the family – indeed her relationship with Benji – is far from perfect but one of them is willing to kill to keep that reputation…

Time for a quick diversion into the televisual medium, and the latest offering from Netflix, The Perfect Couple, based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, not a writer I’ve come across. Professor Puzzle Doctor and I were looking for something new to watch and decided to take a punt on this. I’ll be honest, I was a bit wary as our recent attempts have ended up not getting past episode one or watching it because it was a bit silly – I’m looking at you, Red Eye.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find a well-paced, well-constructed murder mystery. You know, a proper one, with clues. The drama is well around the characters – I did think that given that Nicole Kidman plays Greer, it would all revolve around her, but if anything, it revolves around Amelia, played by Eve Hewson. The cast does a good job all round and me and the Prof did spend time between episodes discussing theories (we don’t binge it, but we probably would have done if it wasn’t late last night when episode 5 finished).

Every revelation was clued in advance. It’s more the sort of clue where you see something and then its potential relevance is revealed in a later episode, where they hope you forget what you saw – but bonus points for the clues being shown when the police are present. There’s also huge bonus points for enough information to deduce the motive – a good one – without spelling it out for the viewer.

There were a couple of issues – one particular arc could have done with a definitive resolution in my mind and… well, I did think the murderer was pretty guessable based both on something structural in the first few episodes and a general issue with the overall structure, although based on that rationale, there is also a very good red herring suspect too. But I could watch Donna Lynne Champlin in basically anything – she plays the main detective – and bonus points for the  murderer being deduced rather than being caught being murdery.

All in all, a pleasant surprise, an enjoyable cast and a decent proper mystery. It’s out now on Netflix, in the UK at least.

One last thing – if you’re reading this on some godforsaken AI article scraping site, please pop across to classicmystery.blog where you can read it where it was meant to be read…