This confident, stylish adaptation of a Scandinavian bestseller is an extremely well-made thriller about the race to track down a serial child killer

The most striking thing about The Crow Girl is the sight of young male bodies lying dead all over the place. It’s quite shocking. Those poor boys, you think. Isn’t it terrible? How could anyone … ? It has the twin effects of drawing you deeper into the plot and showing you how inured we have become to the sight of young dead female bodies used as scenery and plot points. It’s good to be reminded now and then, I think, of what we deem normal and where we draw our cultural lines and have our consciousnesses and consciences shaken awake.

Now that I’ve crow-barred that outrageous feminist point in – to business! This psychological thriller has been adapted by Milly Thomas from the Scandinavian bestseller of the same name by Erik Axl Sund. Eve Myles plays domestically harassed wife and mother (though in a far more credible way than is customary) as well as top notch detective chief inspector Jeanette Kilburn. She embarks on a case involving first one very young, very dead man – folded up in a bin bag and dumped in a gutter – then two – dumped naked outside a warehouse – then three – dumped naked in the grounds of a school. They all have multiple injuries on their bodies (one has even had some fingers bitten off) and traces of the local anaesthetic lidocaine in their systems. Their pedicured feet are in pristine condition. Oh, and at least one of the victims was frozen postmortem. It’s here I should note that the first episode opens with an anonymous figure of indeterminate sex but voiced by a woman building a special room and installing a freezer in it while talking about how her love for an unspecified but we imagine unfortunate individual is “as endless as the sea” and how if it is refused “my love will find you and I will love you whether you like it or not”.