Episode 7 in the first season of the Carnival/Sky series. When a man dies while fleeing for his life, Harry and Suri get sucked into a case involving blackmail, theft, false identities and wealthy foreign students. At first it looks like a simple scam, but it soon becomes clear that the case is connected to the one man Harry is desperate to find – Golding. Deputy mayor Karl Frierson approaches DS Winter with an order to find a way to get Harry thrown off the force, while Eve tells her husband about the discovery she made at Whitecross prison.

Nobody would argue this series was out of the top drama drawer, but when it gets a head of steam up it’s got something. For whatever reason, the plot about a London detective (James Nesbitt) and his pursuit of shadowy high-level criminals has started to liven up and this episode is the best so far.

Harry is on the trail of the mysterious Golding, a man whose name has cropped up in about four different subplots, but we still don’t know who he is… Harry and his excellent DS draw closer as they look into young conmen who target rich foreign students with a sort of reverse honey-trap. But be warned: the opening scene with a tasering-gone-wrong is quite nasty.

Peter Butcher, Radio Times

When it became clear that they were one writer short for covering all the necessary hours, Carnival head Gareth Neame suggested bringing me in to cover a mid-season episode. This meant working outside the team and racing to keep up with the constant flow of story changes as production movied forward. That said, I thought it turned out pretty well.

“Best so far”, though… when I saw that, I knew for sure I would never be asked back.

Stephen Gallagher