Death in Paradise, season 14, episode 4 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 30) my husband Charles and I watched a Death in Paradise episode and then a quite compelling performance by The Wood Brothers on The Kate, a PBS show that’s something like Live at the Belly Up except it’s done from the other side of the U.S. (more on that later). Alas, the Death in Paradise episode was surprisingly boring – I had a hard time staying awake through it. It was about a murder at a rum distillery called Ambrose whose founder had suddenly died. The founder had left behind two children, son Patrick (Ansu Kabia) and daughter Cora (Madeline Appiah). For the previous 18 years Cora had worked her ass off to keep the distillery going while Patrick left the fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Honoré or Marie or whatever the locale of Death in Paradise is called and didn’t return until his dad died, whereupon the will was opened and Patrick inherited the whole business even though he hadn’t had anything to do with running it for 18 years. His sole interest in the distillery is in cashing it out, so in order to make his money quickly and get the hell out of there again he cuts a deal with a larger company to buy the place. The deal papers are supposed to be signed at a private celebration with several other people there, and they’re supposed to drink from the same bottle of Ambrose rum to commemorate. But when he takes a second drink from the bottle, Patrick suddenly collapses and ultimately dies, while the others get sick. One of them, Saunders, dies later, and for about 52 minutes of running time the Black constabulary try to figure out whodunit.

The resolution is not that surprising – Cora murdered her brother to stop the sale of Ambrose Distillery and get back at him for having inherited the business even though she’d been running it all those years – though her murder method is. Cora killed Patrick and Saunders and sickened the others by injecting the rum with methanol, also known as wood alcohol, an incredibly toxic substance (I remember the warnings from my own childhood never to drink it because at worst it would kill you and at best it would leave you blind). But she did it in a quirky way; she poured the first round of drinks from an uncontaminated bottle, then injected both the bottle and a previous soft drink Patrick had had with the methanol, so Patrick would get the immediately lethal dose and the others would get sick but not croak. Not only that, she also spiked the ice cubes with methanol; Patrick, who drank the rum “neat” without ice, got the pre-dose of methanol from his soft drink and Saunders got his methanol from both the spiked rum and the spiked ice cubes. It’s yet another one of the preposterous murder schemes beloved of so many mystery writers that seem flamboyantly unrealistic in the actual world, and frankly I felt sorry and hoped that Cora would not turn out to be the murderer because I liked her and what she’d done to keep the place running. It didn’t help that the producers of Death in Paradise have maintained the annoying comic-relief character of apprentice police officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who as I said about him in a previous post seemed there to prove they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and this time they put black plastic into it. It also doesn’t help that the lead cop, detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), is so dour as a personality. There’s a bit of pathos in the end as Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), the avuncular executive who’s Wilson’s direct supervisor, sees an online posting for a petition aimed at saving his job from whatever “genius” in the island’s administrative hierarchy decided to lay him off.