The Marlow Murder Club Season 3 Episode 1 Review: A Murdered Mayor and Mysterious Messages

We catch up quickly with our heroines on The Marlow Murder Club Season 3 Episode 1, “The Queen of Poisons, Part 1”.   We meet Susie just in time for her to witness Geoffrey collapse and clutch his coffee cup as he dies.

With four others in the closed room: Marcus, Terrence, Debbie, and Sophia, the suspect list seems clear. Sophia’s garden of poisonous plants is especially ominous, but she was indebted to Geoffrey and is the last person to want harm to come to him.

Investigations reveal that another man, Alec, was meant to be at the meeting. He got a call from “Sophia” telling him not to come, but she claims she never made it. Meanwhile, Judith receives her own strange calls telling her to “follow the money”.

The calls are tracked to yet another man, Dave, who also insists that he loved Geoffrey, having been poised to enter a publishing deal with him. Finally, the ladies stumble upon a mysterious figure, but the person flees before they can catch up.

Meanwhile, Judith has a potential new beau (much to the delight of her friends), Becks tries and fails to enjoy some time to herself while her family is on a camping trip, and Tanika is troubled to hear her daughter may be involved with bullying.

After nearly a year away, it’s lovely to return to the charmingly murderous town of Marlow. As far less time has passed for our characters, it’s not too surprising that they’ve hardly changed at all, through I’d still like more time to catch up.

Following the format of season 2, the plot of this two-episode story is based off Robert Thorogood’s book of the same time, while future episodes will have original plots. But knowing the outcome of the case only takes a little from its drama.

Condensing a full book into around 95 total minutes of screentime does make the wealth of potential suspects feel a bit more intimidating, though by now we can already expect most of them to be dismissible as red herrings.

As such, the biggest question may not have to do with any of them so much as whether Geoffrey can really have been the all-around nobleman that he appears to have with all the charity work and personal favors attributed to his name.

Everyone’s unwillingness to say a single negative thing about him- at least face to face- is dubious enough before the anonymous messages start rolling it. And by the end of the hour, a note confirms our victim had at least one major secret to hide.

Again, I hope the conclusion is able to tie all these loose threads together relatively quickly, mostly to give us more time in the personal lives of Judith, Suzie, Becks, and Tanika. I’d especially like to see more of Ms. Pott’s love life.

Without giving anything away if you’ve already read the book, do you have any guesses as to who killed Marlow’s mayor? And especially if you’re a reader, what would you like to see the show add to the cases and the lives of the people involved in them?

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The Marlow Murder Club airs Sundays at 8/7c on PBS.

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