TV Pick of the Week: High Country - review by Yvette Huddleston

Whitford is taking over from soon-to-retire police sergeant Sam Dyson (Ian McElhinney) and has relocated to the small town of Brokenridge with her partner Helen (Sara Wiseman) and teenage daughter Kirra (Pez Warner). They are all readjusting to their new surroundings, and Kirra is none-too-pleased about having to live out in the sticks, which is causing some tension in the family.

On her first day in post, as Dyson is doing his handover and introducing her to the locals, Andie is thrown straight into the fray when she discovers an abandoned car by the side of the road, overlooking a steep wooded ridge. There is no sign of the driver anywhere who appears to have walked into the wilderness. Once he is identified, however, and a gruesome discovery is made at his house, the search becomes one not just for a missing person but for a potential murderer.

It seems that there have been other similar disappearances over the past few months and Whitford suggests that this might be a pattern, a theory quickly dismissed by Dyson. At his retirement party Dyson announces that he is planning on spending his time going fishing, although his preoccupation with the murder of a young boy several years previously would suggest otherwise.

The prime suspect in that case is former primary school teacher Damien (Henry Nixon) who has been suspended from his post, but there has never been any solid evidence found against him. He claims to be psychic and while Whitford is sceptical about the information he gives her regarding the missing car driver and a hiker who has also disappeared, it does prove to be useful. She decides to recruit him as a consultant on the case, much to Dyson’s disgust – he is convinced that Damien is the child killer and should not be trusted.

In amongst her investigations, Whitford also has to deal with some of the locals who have not been quite as welcoming – one night for example after hearing a noise she goes outside to find a decapitated deer on her driveway. There are some perhaps too familiar fish-out-of-water tropes here, but generally this is an extremely watchable series with some neat, surprising narrative twists.