Death in Paradise: Season 14, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired April 9, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, February 27) I watched an episode of the engaging if not altogether satisfying BBC/PBS policier Death in Paradise, set on a fictitious Caribbean island called “Saint-Marie” or “Honoré” but actually filmed on the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe (whose tourism board is actually listed on the production credits; obviously they’re hoping this show will encourage people to vacation in Guadeloupe). An ambiguous listing on imdb.com suggested this would be a story about an actor who drops dead in the middle of a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (it’s odd to suggest that particular play for this plot device, but I’ve always been partial to stories about theatre productions in which a character really dies during the course of a play). Instead it turned out to be a whodunit about an organization that ostensibly rescues sea turtles and protects them from going extinct, run by husband-and-wife team Callum (Rupert Young) and Sadie (Lyndsey Marshal) Jones. The victim is a short-haired butch woman who calls herself Rosa Martinez (Lily Nichol) who’s killed and left behind in “The Shack,” a beachfront residence occupied by detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). Wilson’s long-delayed departure to London has become a recurring gimmick in this show, and he locks “The Shack” behind him as he departs for his this-is-it flight to London – only he’s contacted at the airport and summoned back even though, given that the victim was found in his home, not only is he not allowed to investigate officially but he’s at least briefly a suspect. The local cops, including the annoying comic-relief character of probation officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah) – who in this episode admits he only took the job because his mom was desperate for him to find some way to make a living instead of sleeping on her couch all day, and being a police officer looked like the coolest job opportunity on the island – discover that there are no official records to show that “Rosa Martinez” existed or traveled to the island.

“Rosa” turns out to be Leah, a British investigative journalist working for a paper in Manchester (as Wilson realizes when he sees the interior of “The Shack” and sees it’s exactly as he left it on his way to the airport for yet another London-bound flight he’d miss except that a postcard from someone in Manchester has been turned around so the return address is visible) to expose the sea-turtle organization. Instead of actually preserving the sea-turtle eggs so they can hatch and keep the species going, the Joneses are actually selling them on the black market to a group of smugglers, who in turn place them with their eventual users, gourmands who like the idea of eating an endangered species. The Joneses had an “open relationship” in which they each could date (and have sex with) other people, and accordingly both Callum and Sadie drifted into affairs with their volunteers ¬– only the affair between Callum and Rosa/Leah turned out to be a lot more serious, at least on his end. In the end it turns out that both Callum and Sadie were involved in Rosa’s death: Sadie confronted her on the turtle group’s boat and clubbed her with a boathook. Fleeing for her life, Rosa hid out in “The Shack” before Wilson got there and called Callum, thinking she could trust him. Instead they got into a big argument over Callum’s discovery that Rosa was never in love or particularly interested in him. She was only having the affair with him to get information for her article exposing the fraudulent sea-turtle charity. In the end the Joneses are both arrested and life goes on for both Wilson and his immediate supervisor, Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who was called away to a meeting on Jamaica on which the future of his job supposedly depended, though it’s still uncertain at the end of this episode (the final one of the 14th season) whether Wilson is going to stay on Guadeloupe or not. Death in Paradise is actually a charming little show, and if the intent of the Guadeloupian tourist board in co-producing and helping bankroll this show was to encourage tourist visits to their island, it’s probably succeeding. As a crime drama, it’s not exactly thrill-a-minute, but it’s a nice bit of fun.