Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 6 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe; TV series episode, aired March 26, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, June 5) I watched another Death in Paradise episode, number six of season 14, which was ballyhooed as a story about the dangers of Internet dating. It’s actually about a rather silly Englishwoman, Danielle Bailey (Charlotte Spencer), who flies out to the Caribbean island of Sainte Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism board co-produces the show, obviously thinking that the gorgeous island scenery depicted in vivid color will attract visitors despite the morbid nature of the plots) to meet a man she’s been in an online relationship with for a month or so but hasn’t previously met. She knows the man as “Kristion Butler” and he’s a tall, strikingly handsome Black man (Danielle herself is white). Unfortunately, when she flies in on the private plane that’s the only way you can get onto or off of Sainte Marie by air (the island isn’t big enough for anything bigger than a general-aviation airport) and calls Kristion to let him know she’s arrived, she watches a scene on her video phone in which he’s accosted and attacked by an unknown male assailant. She goes out to his home, a villa on the outskirts of the island, and finds him dead. The police have four suspects for the murder: Danielle herself; her white Anglo ex-boyfriend Gary Baines (Alexander Cobb), who was convinced that “Kristion” was a scam artist out to rip her off financially; Delmar Lloyd (Tony Marshall), the driver who picked her up at the airport and was there when she got the fatal phone call; and Kelly Herbert (Tala Gouveia), one of “Kristion”’s former victims. It doesn’t take the police long enough to realize that “Kristion” was a professional con artist whose racket was seducing women online over long distances and scamming them out of their money, then dumping them after he’d milked them dry. The cops learn this when amongst his belongings they find five passports and five drivers’ licenses, all in different names but with his same photo on all of them, and also four cell phones, each of which has a texting history with all women as his recipients. They also learn that his real name is Adam Carter.

There’s a great scene in which Kelly Herbert pushes the unfunny “comic relief” character, Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), off a pier as he’s trying to question her. Interspersed in all of this are two subplots, one about the continuing efforts of Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet) to solve the mysterious disappearance and death of his mother; and another about Wilson’s immediate supervisor, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who’s being removed from that job by the governing authorities in Kingston, Jamaica and replaced by an insufferably snobbish and maddening young man, Sterling Fox (Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge). Ultimately the main intrigue is solved by writer James Hall in one of those absurdly contrived mystery resolutions that might have made Agatha Christie blush: it seems that the apparent murder scene Danielle saw on her phone was a staged video Adam Carter had created himself to convince his pigeons that he needed money immediately to pay off some particularly violent creditors. Adam was actually killed after Danielle saw the video on her phone, and the killer was [spoiler alert!] Delmar Lloyd, who was involved with Adam in a criminal scheme that gave him access to Adam’s considerable stash of rolls of large-denomination bills. Alas, Lloyd was ripping Adam off by substituting counterfeit money for Adam’s real deal (though how he made enough convincing counterfeit money to pull off the scheme, writer Hall never quite explained), and apparently it was to keep Adam from finding him out that Delmar determined to bring a pistol with a silencer to Adam’s villa (which, true to form, he merely rented even though he told his “pigeons” that he owned it) and kill him after he brought Danielle there while Danielle was still slowly making her way through Adam’s house before coming on his dead body. I had a hard time with the ending as well as the not particularly amusing confrontations between retiring Commissioner Patterson and his rather ludicrous replacement, who said he'd been sent out by the authorities in Kingston to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the Sainte Marie police department (he starts to sound like a Black version of Elon Musk after a while!), but this was still a fun show and worth watching if only for the gorgeous Caribbean scenery against whose backdrop the skullduggery takes place!