Midsomer Murders: "Book of the Dead" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 11, 2023)

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

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on January 15 I initially turned to CBS in hopes that they were doing another rerun of Elsbeth, a police procedural that’s become a particular favorite of mine even though it’s basically just the old Columbo with a woman playing Peter Falk’s role of the police consultant who basically annoys the murderer into confessing. Instead they were showing another Matlock instead, so I switched to PBS in time to catch an unusually well plotted and structured episode of the British police procedural Midsomer Murders. It was called “Book of the Dead” and it deals with the antics of Bertram Jewel (Jon Culshaw – ironically also the name, though he spelled it “John Culshaw,” of the British Decca record producer who supervised the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen). Ten years earlier, Jewel published a sensationally successful picture book called Seeker, which contained a series of elaborate drawings, paintings, and text which allegedly would lead someone to find a hidden treasure if they could solve all the puzzles contained therein. Jewel comes to Midsomer County (a fictional locale in central England) to promote the 10th anniversary edition of his book, which will contain a new page that will supposedly reveal a new clue as to the locale of his treasure. Only when he holds forth for a book event at the local church, pastored by Rev. Sebastian Butts (Oliver Dimsdale) – who’s white, but his wife Ava (Mina Andala) is Black, or should I say “African-British” – a woman reporter, Billie Bernard (Christina Bennington), accosts him at the event and claims that “Bertram Jewel” is really former con artist Robert Grimes, who served 15 years in prison for his fraud and had just got out when he wrote Seeker. Billie also says flat-out that there is no hidden treasure; it’s all yet another con which Bertram a.k.a. Robert pulled on his unsuspecting readers.

Among his most fanatical devotees are Rev. Butts’s mother Venetia (Selina Cadell), who became so insistent on finding Jewel’s treasure that she spent hundreds of thousand of pounds on detectives, psychics, and all manner of fraudsters to get supposed “evidence” on how to solve Bertram’s puzzle; Ludo Trask (Zak Ford-Williams), teenage son of Eli Trask (Shaun Dooley) and his wife Danica (Sally Lindsay), who’s filled his shack on the Trask property with various blow-ups of the pages of Seeker in hopes that by magnifying them, he can work out the clues; and even detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), who at one point in his life was so wrapped up in solving Seeker that he lost a girlfriend over it. (Smart woman!) There are amusing scenes of the devotées of Seeker poring over the clues and debating them that reminded me of the ways similarly demented fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings talk amongst themselves about the minutiae of the books. Anyway, Bertram Jewel, t/n Robert Grimes, gets murdered in a particularly imaginative way: he is clubbed from behind and buried in a pit from which his head is sticking out. Then his killer puts a glass globe over his head and holds it there until he expires from suffocation. Apparently this is supposed to be a living recreation of one of the images in Seeker. Later the same killer murders both Venetia Butts and her son, staging Venetia’s body to duplicate one of the images in the original Seeker and Sebastian’s after the new page, which exists only in one copy plus a black-and-white reconstruction from memory Ludo Trask drew at Venetia’s insistence even though he only saw the image briefly when Jewel gave him a quick glimpse of it.

There’s also a subplot concerning two African-British owners of a local pub, Joel Myhill (Rhashan Stone) and his daughter Scarlett (Felixe Forde), who run a regular (though writer Jeff Povey doesn’t tell us how regular) trivia contest in their bar in honor of Joel’s late wife, who it turns out was killed by Bertram’s old con. Bertram t/n Robert was producing fake gas gauges that were supposed to show if you had a gas leak, only they didn’t work at all. The Myhills bought one of the fake gas gauges and then had a real gas leak; Joel and Scarlett were fortuitously out then but Joel’s wife was killed in the resulting house fire, and he’s never forgiven Bertram for it. In the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Eli Trask, Ludo’s father and contractor for the reconstruction of Rev. Butts’s church. Though Bertram as “Robert” was the only one prosecuted for the fake gas-gauge fraud, Eli was actually his accomplice and manufactured the phony gauges. Bertram blackmailed Eli into allowing him to live in the Trasks’ home while he was in the area, and Eli killed him and the others because he was seeing his son Ludo wasting a huge amount of time and money searching for the “treasure” that didn’t really exist – though, at one point, Bertram produced an incredibly ugly gold-plated statue and tried to pass it off as the treasure. Venetia found it and tried to sell it to local antiques dealer Othello Khan, only he revealed that it was manufactured only a year before and was just gold-plated instead of solid gold. This was an unusually well-constructed Midsomer Murders in which there was only one subsidiary crime (Rev. Butts’s embezzlement) besides the main murder intrigue, and it related directly to the main dramatic issue of Bertram’s history as a fraudster.