Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 3 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired March 5, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, May 15) I put on a Death in Paradise rerun (Season 14, episode three, originally broadcast March 5, 2025) that was actually one of the most engaging episodes of this often entertaining, often exasperating program. It dealt with the murder of Susie Montagu (Georgia Maguire), a woman who was born and raised in Britain but moved to the island of Sainte Marie because the British climate was playing havoc with her health. She nursed herself back to good health through the island’s tropical climate and she and her husband Steve (David Mumeni) started a business making and selling health-care products. One of the ingredients in one of their concoctions was snakeskin, though they insisted that they didn’t actually kill snakes to make the product: they just harvested the skins once the snakes shed them naturally. To do this, they had to keep venomous snakes on the company premises, and one of their workers, a white woman named Daisy McCrae (Imogen King) developed a way to extract the snake venom and turn it into a recreational drug which she then sold on the black market. The problem with this is the same one as the real-life drug fentanyl: the dose tolerance is very narrow and too much of the stuff can literally kill you. What complicated the case is that Susie Montagu was also deathly allergic to peanuts, and when she collapses and dies in the middle of an event introducing a new skin cream her company is about to market, everyone on site assumes that she ate or drank something containing peanuts or peanut oil. Carrie Standish (Patricia Allison) even administered an EpiPen, the standard-issue precaution most people with severe allergies carry around with them in case of an emergency, but the EpiPen has no effect even though later tests at the police lab show it did its job: it injected Susie’s body with adrenaline. The medical examiner finds traces of peanut oil around Susie’s mouth but there’s no evidence of how it got there, since she’d been on one of her periodic fasts and had had nothing to eat or drink for at least a day before she died. This was one of the episodes made after Black actor Don Gilet replaced white actor Neville Parker as the lead detective character, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson. It was also made after the introduction of a really bothersome comic-relief character, Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who gets assigned by Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) to break up a rave on the beach after the party gets noise complaints from residents. Rose is hopelessly unable to do that on his own and finally requests backup.

Mervin Wilson insists on driving the Land-Rover that is the Sainte Marie police force’s principal mode of transportation even though it has a stick shift and he doesn’t know how to drive one. His partner, Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder), suffers through his attempts to drive the car and his repeated backups into a light pole. This gives Wilson the insight he needs to solve the case: he deduces that Susie Montagu actually received two injections, one of snake venom that killed her and one from the EpiPen she received later in a last-ditch attempt to save her life. Wilson is also able to deduce who the murderer was when he learns that Susie Montagu had just filed papers to divorce herself from Steve, and had also fired Carrie Standish from the company’s board of directors less than a month after having hired her. It seems that, after Standish actually invented the skin cream the company was about to market, she and Steve drifted into an affair. Susie caught them at it and determined to rid the company of both of them, and Standish fought back by killing Susie with some of Daisy McCrae’s snake venom. To conceal it, she then injected Susie with the EpiPen in the same part of her body (her upper leg) where she’d earlier injected the poison. At the end the police arrest Carrie Standish and also Daisy McCrae, who though she wasn’t involved in Susie’s murder was running an illegal drug operation using the company as a cover. We also get at least partial resolutions of at least two running subplots on the show. Mervin Wilson has been using police resources to investigate the suspicious death of his mother months before, and he gets a flash drive from Police Commissioner Patterson containing an audio version of Mervin’s mom’s frantic SOS call, which establishes to both Merwin’s satisfaction and ours that his mother’s death was indeed an accident. We also learn that Patterson’s job is in jeopardy from higher-ups in the island’s administration who are threatening to eliminate his position, which is the reason he’s been snapping at all his subordinates on the force instead of being his normal, easy-going self. Death in Paradise is usually a pretty mediocre policier distinguished only by the gorgeous Caribbean scenery and the bright clothes worn by the police (Officer Curtis in particular; just about her entire wardrobe is made up of neon-bright fabrics), but this time it was better than usual and offers a much more engaging and credible solution to the mystery.