“Dublin Murders”: A Chilling Descent into Memory, Madness, and the Murky Edges of Truth

There’s a peculiar symmetry to the opening and closing moments of Dublin Murders — one that perfectly encapsulates the haunting, circular nature of the story it tells. In one satisfying inversion, the finale of Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels begins with the first meeting between its two central detectives, Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene) and Rob Reilly (Killian Scott). Their introduction is tinged with the hesitant excitement of new partnership — two damaged people about to wade into darkness together. The first episode, by contrast, had opened with their final, fractured parting, a harried flash-forward that warned viewers: this story does not end well.

That structure — looping, mirroring, and deliberately disorienting — is the backbone of Dublin Murders (BBC One; RTE). It’s a series that refuses to play the usual detective drama game. Instead of chasing tidy resolutions, it wanders through the psychological wreckage left by unsolved crimes, haunted childhoods, and moral decay.

Sarah Phelps, best known for her razor-sharp adaptations of Agatha Christie novels, has taken French’s literary complexity and translated it into something intimate and eerie — a slow, fog-drenched unraveling of human guilt.

The Dual Mysteries

The premise begins deceptively simply. In 2006, the body of a 13-year-old girl named Katy Devlin is found at an archaeological site in the woods outside Dublin — the same woods where, twenty years earlier, two children vanished without a trace. Assigned to the case are detectives Rob Reilly, an Englishman working with the Dublin Murder Squad, and Cassie Maddox, his whip-smart, sardonic partner.

But there’s a twist: Rob is not who he seems. His real name is Adam, and he was the third child who disappeared in those same woods decades ago — the only one who came back. His past is a secret he guards even from Cassie, and as the investigation drags him back to the place of his trauma, his grip on reality begins to slip.

Meanwhile, Cassie finds herself drawn into her own mirror case. A woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to her — so exact it borders on supernatural — turns up dead, stabbed in the heart. The victim’s name is Lexie Mangan, and she was living under an alias that Cassie herself once used while working undercover. It’s a coincidence too strange to ignore, and too personal to resist.

Haunted by the Past

From its first episode, Dublin Murders pulses with a sense of unease — not just from the murders themselves, but from the idea that the past never really dies. The Irish countryside is filmed like a living ghost: mist curling through trees, rain seeping into every frame, time itself rotting beneath the surface.

The show’s title might suggest a procedural, but this is something else entirely — a meditation on identity, memory, and the lies we tell to survive. Both Rob and Cassie are detectives in free fall, investigating others while slowly dismantling themselves.

In one of the series’ defining moments, after leaving her first crime scene, Cassie mutters with eerie calm: “I think I got a bit of our girl on my shoe.” It’s a line that captures her character perfectly — detached, clever, and quietly broken. Greene plays her with exquisite restraint, her eyes a mix of empathy and exhaustion. Cassie is one of the rare female detectives on television who feels genuinely lived-in — not a trope, not a symbol, but a person clawing her way through emotional debris.

Killian Scott, meanwhile, gives Rob a fragile intensity. His performance is a slow implosion — guilt made flesh. The closer he gets to solving the crime, the more he unravels, until the detective and the suspect, the hunter and the haunted, become indistinguishable.

Sarah Phelps’ Dark Poetry

Sarah Phelps’ writing is as sharp as it is sorrowful. She understands that Dublin Murders isn’t just about who killed a girl in the woods — it’s about what those woods represent. They’re the collective subconscious of a generation, filled with buried grief and national guilt. Ireland, in her adaptation, becomes a landscape of ghosts — personal and political alike.

The dialogue is crisp yet loaded with emotion, the pacing deliberate but never dull. Phelps crafts each scene with an eye for quiet devastation — a glance, a hesitation, a truth half-spoken. The finale, in particular, refuses easy catharsis. Questions linger. Mysteries remain half-solved. What we’re left with isn’t closure, but consequence.

A Triumph of Mood and Meaning

Visually, Dublin Murders is stunning — drenched in atmosphere yet grounded in realism. The camera lingers on damp forests, dimly lit interrogation rooms, and faces caught between guilt and denial. The sound design amplifies the unease: the rustle of leaves, the distant echo of a child’s laughter, the silence that follows a revelation.

And yet, for all its darkness, there’s beauty here — in the tenderness between Rob and Cassie, in their shared trauma, in their unspoken care for one another. It’s a show about loss, but also about connection — the fragile threads that keep us tethered to the world when everything else fades.

Final Verdict

Dublin Murders isn’t an easy watch. It’s unsettling, emotionally dense, and defiantly ambiguous. But it’s also one of the most accomplished crime dramas of recent years — a psychological labyrinth that rewards patience and empathy.

Sarah Phelps’ adaptation doesn’t just tell a mystery; it digs into what it means to live with one.

By the time the final credits roll, the question isn’t who killed Katy Devlin — it’s whether truth itself can ever be unearthed without losing a part of yourself in the process.