The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Dead and Buried" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, January 2) I watched the fourth and last 2019 episode of the fascinating detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries, both set and shot in New Zealand and featuring Brokenwood police detectives Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), and Sam Breen (red-headed hottie Nic Sampson), along with medical examiner and Russian émigré Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Serban Ionda) and Native hanger-on Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor). This episode was called “Dead and Buried” and centers around the Brokenwood Women’s Prison, which is being run by a private company under contract to the local government. It’s a sort of locked-room mystery in which the victim, Corina Dawes (Romy Hooper), is found alone in her cell with a wound from an unidentified weapon. No one knows who could have got in or out, so the authorities at first assume Corina committed suicide until Gina conducts a test with a slab of beef in the police station. The point of Gina’s test is to prove you couldn’t stab yourself to death with a pencil, as Corina is supposed to have done, without breaking off either the lead tip or the whole pencil. Gina also figures out, after a long process of elimination, that the murder weapon was actually the sharpened tip of a stiletto heel and whoever killed Corina stamped her to death with the point of her heel after first leaving a bruise in the shape of a toe. The suspects include the prison’s resident Jesus freak, Rayleen Hogg (Yvette Parsons), who constantly reads the Bible and pretends to have overcome the bad stuff that got her in prison in the first place. Her Biblical literacy is a bit shaky – she attributes the Ten Commandments and the Parting of the Red Sea to Christ instead of Moses – along with Brenda White (Amanda Billing), Trudy Neilson (Tracy Lee Gray), who has a brother named Ray(Jason Hoyte) who owns a bar in the area; and other tough-as-nails women named Angela (Teuila Blakely) and Kasey (Michelle Leuthart). There’s a charming mid-episode sequence detailing how these women got into prison in the first place: one stabbed both her boyfriend and his paramour after she caught them in flagrante delicto; one killed a prominent woman country singer by plunging a live electric guitar into her bathtub as she was taking a bath; and Corina killed her physically abusive husband, which was why she got a relatively light seven-year sentence instead of life in prison.

She also buried his body and has refused to tell anyone exactly where, which means his family (who judging from the two members we actually meet – his mother and a brother who literally lost his power of speech when he got into a bar fight and tore his larynx – are just as nasty as he was) can’t recover the body themselves and find “closure.” The prison warden is Kimberly Mason (Zara Cormack), who within the limited budget she has to work with is actually trying to make inmate conditions look as good as possible, including allowing them to dress in either yellow or purple tops, while she herself parades around as the epitome of fashion, or at least as someone in her social position sees it. It wasn’t at all surprising to me that the murderer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Denise (Aurora Rawson) a heavy-set woman who was one of the guards – and her motive was that she was having a Lesbian affair with Trudy Nielson and was worried that Corina was going to seduce Trudy away from her. There’s also a subplot involving a map Corina supposedly drew before she was killed showing where she had buried her late husband’s body. Brenda claims to have it – and wins a provisional deal to be released from prison early if her info pans out – but when the police assemble Brenda, her attorney (who also represents Trudy), and the late husband’s family to exhume him, Gina comes along and says, “I smell something fishy.” It turns out the map showed the location of an actual fish buried there as part of a plan by a woman prisoner named Miranda Temple (Laura Hill), who got Trudy to tell her brother to catch a fish, put a crystal in its mouth, and bury it at a precise location to give her good vibrations while in prison. (I’m not making this up, you know!) Later Trudy reveals that she has Corine’s real map and the cops – sans the relatives, since Mike Shepherd doesn’t want to take them on a second wild-goose chase – find the remains. Trudy gets an early release from prison only to be re-arrested on suspicion of helping Denise with her plot to murder Corine – only the prosecutors decide there isn’t enough evidence to charge her and let her go, so the final scene shows her drinking away in her brother’s bar. I liked the fact that the Lesbian relationships between inmates and inmates, and between inmates and guards, were drawn with a certain level of sympathy and an indication of real affection between the participants, but overall I liked this Brokenwood Mysteries episode a good deal less than the immediately previous one, “Dead Men Don’t Shoot Ducks,” a brilliant skewering of hunting culture in which the murder victim is an animal-rights activist determined to sabotage the local duck hunt by distracting the ducks and driving them away. (I especially liked the irony that one of her ways of doing that was to bring a boombox to her boat and play the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walküre, appropriate since Wagner was an animal-rights activist himself.)