Multi TV Week Logie award winner Rebecca Gibney (Halifax: Retribution, Packed to the Rafters) and Chelsie Preston Crayford (Underbelly: Razor, M3GAN) star in the new crime drama series, A Remarkable Place To Die.
Gibney plays the mother of Anaís Mallory (Preston Crayford), alongside a top-drawer cast including Michala Banas (McLeod’s Daughters, Winners & Losers), Roy Billing (Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities, Jack Irish), Indiana Evans (Home and Away, H2O: Just Add Water), Alex Tarrant (NCIS: Hawaii, 800 Words), Charles Jazz Terrier (Wentworth, Neighbours) and Nathalie Boltt (Riverdale, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).
A Remarkable Place To Die follows smart and savvy homicide detective Anaís Mallory as she returns to her hometown of Queenstown and is forced to confront her strained relationship with her mother and the ghosts of her past, including her ex-fiancé Luke who is now married to her ex-best friend Maja.
With a stellar policing career under her belt after a secondment to Sydney, Mallory is hoping to exorcise her demons and unravel the secrets surrounding the deaths of her father and sister.
As bodies start turning up around the tourist town, Mallory and her team solve a series of intriguing cases, and the suspicions about the tragedies that have beset her family come into focus. She is convinced that her ex-fiancé is somehow involved in their deaths – and that her mother knows more than she is letting on.
A Remarkable Place To Die is an original drama production for the 9Network, along with ZDF, Acorn and TVNZ. The series was created by Screentime New Zealand and co-produced with Real Film Berlin in association with Banijay Rights.
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It is a 4 x 90 minute series according to a TVNZ press release from February this year.
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SERIES SYNOPSIS
Anaís Mallory (Chelsie Preston Crayford) is a homicide detective – and a damn good one. She’s had a stellar career since taking a transfer to Sydney, but now she has bitten the bullet and returned to Queenstown, New Zealand, to take up a lead detective position in the place she loves and hates in equal measure.
For her, it’s not just a job.
Her return is a mission to exorcise some personal demons and permanently erase the “hate” part of the equation – because this remarkable place, despite all its complications, is home. Anaís left not long after her father was killed. His assailants are both in jail. She believes that he was murdered after stumbling into a criminal enterprise. In this series, she’ll discover there was more to his death than initially thought, and the implications are spreading to others she loves.
Now her sister Lynne (Tara Canton) is dead as well – killed in a car accident, which to Anaís is highly suspicious. She’s determined to unravel the mystery – a task that is continually complicated by her difficult and strained relationship with her grieving mother (Rebecca Gibney) and by inescapable contact with her ex-fiance, prominent local businessman Luke Staunton (Charles Jazz Terrier), who has remained close to her mother and, in her absence, has married her best friend, Maja Berg (Indiana Evans). As Anaís deals with all this, and with a series of cases, each a unique and challenging mystery, she is sustained by an ever-strengthening bond with her work colleagues. They are: Inspector Sharon Li Feng (Lynette Forday); Detective Simon Delaney (Matt Whelan); Constable Jarrod Renner (Dahnu Graham); and Senior Constable Hoana Rata (Roimata Fox). Case by case, the team becomes stronger and closer.
Anaís also finds support in Ihaka Cooper (Alex Tarrant) – an old school friend and now the pathologist for the Queenstown area. As Anaís solves a series of very different and intriguing cases, her suspicions about the tragedies that have beset her family come more and more into focus. She becomes convinced that her ex-fiance, Luke, is somehow involved in both deaths – and that her mother knows more than she is letting on.
CAST Details
EPISODE ONE - SKIPPERS
Sunday, November 17, at 8.00pm
Skippers Canyon Road is one of the top 10 most dangerous roads in the world. It’s a killer. In this case, though, it gets a little help…
Detective Anaís Mallory is hiding a secret agenda when she returns to a posting in Queenstown, a fraught relationship with her mother, and some challenging confrontations with personal history. On the very day she returns, a car goes over a cliff – but it’s not a straightforward accident. The autopsy reveals the “driver” had been dead for three days. Anaís has a murder on her hands. In her investigation, she will get to know her new police “family”: avuncular Inspector Sharon Li Feng; the slightly resentful Detective Simon Delaney; experienced Sergeant Hoana Rata; and young Constable Jarrod Renner. It will propel all of them into the less-glamorous working underbelly of Queenstown – the backstreets, kitchens and backpacker joints where a young, itinerant, multicultural population struggles to make ends meet. It will also bring Anaís into unwelcome contact with her ex-fiance, Luke Staunton, who is now married to her ex-best friend, Maja.
It’s a small town. Multiple suspects surface, including the wealthy owners of the car, Sebastian and Marijke van Heusen, a couple of Spanish backpackers, and seedy George Sterling, who runs Beppo’s, the hostel where the victim was staying. Before long, “victim” becomes “victims”. The young man’s girlfriend, ChaCha, is also dead, killed at roughly the same time as him. Anaís now has two murders to solve. Ongoing investigation reveals a raft of details about the grime behind the glitter in Queenstown. Eventually, anomalies about the reporting of the missing car and events leading up to its theft provide an answer to both deaths. In a startling interview, Anaís manipulates the killer into a confession, and we learn how events unfolded. Two murders are solved – but Anaís has angered her mother, her erstwhile friends and other members of the town’s power élite. Queenstown’s underbelly has been exposed, and it’s not a good look. Things get even more complicated for Anaís when finally, with time to pursue her secret agenda, she finds evidence that her sister had been taking a Class A drug before she died.
The drama will have a two-hour debut on TVNZ 1 this Sunday (November 3) at 8.30pm.
Episode 4 (season finale) is on Nine this Sunday, December 8, at the later time of 9pm.
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