Prime Time

The second in the Annika Bengtzon Crime Reporter series was for me inferior to the first. This one revolved around the murder of a go-getting TV magazine-show hostess and took the form of an almost traditional whodunit with the myriad suspects holed up in the same building as the victim and most, as you'd expect, with a motive to kill her.

Our heroine gets involved by dint of one of her newspaper colleagues being one of the party of ten ensconced with the victim on her last night alive and in choosing the chance of a big story over a family weekend away with her children and her boy-friend's family, puts her relationship with him under strain.

Eventually, after 90 fairly confusing and uninvolving minutes, Annika solves the murder mystery and resolves her faltering relationship with her boy-friend, but this example of Swedish noir is no real competition for Wallander and really needs to do something to make the central character more distinctive and memorable.

This was a very run-of-the-mill story told in a matter of fact way, but failed to engage, leaving me to hope the rest of the series improved on the rather ordinary TV movie standard reached here.