**_A dark and well-made show about the effects of psychological trauma, but the bifurcated narrative is a significant mistake_** > _What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this – two things: I crave truth. And I lie._ - Tana French; _In the Woods_ (2007) > _Sarte was right, Hell is other people._ - Tana French; _The Likeness_ (2008) Airing on BBC One in the UK and Ireland and Starz in North America, _Dublin Murders_ is an eight-part series that adapts the first two novels in Tana French's _Dublin Murder Squad_ series – _In the Woods_ (2007) and _The Likeness_ (2008). And herein lies the show's biggest problem. French's series is pseudo-anthological in design; each novel has a different protagonist, and although there are common characters across all of the stories, each plot is wholly self-contained. In writing _Dublin Murders_, Sarah Phelps has made the strange decision to present the plots of the first two novels as happening concurrently, with each case bleeding slightly into the other. This doesn't even remotely work, with the events of _The Likeness_ never feeling like anything other than a half-baked B-plot that serves only to detract from the far superior material in the A-plot. It's a maddening decision, as _In the Woods_ could have made a superb five or six-part series, but instead we've got an over-long eight-parter with a ton of what feels like comp…

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