I looked up Cyprus’ murder rate for this!

According to the United Nations, our island ranks 175th in the world for homicides; not bad, given that 206 countries are listed. Certainly, we’re well below the front-runners (Jamaica comes first, with over 1,000 murders per year), most of whom are in the ‘Latin Americas and the Caribbean’ category.

Clearly, palm trees and balmy seas don’t always make for a peaceful paradise. It makes you grateful to be in Cyprus. Happy to be living on an island where murder is, thank goodness, so rare that my passion for whodunnits can be satisfied by fiction rather than fact!

From Marple to Midsomer, Frost to Fisher, there are few murder mysteries I haven’t watched. (Repeatedly. Sometimes from between my fingers!) So the launch of Death and Other Details earlier this month had me on the edge of my seat…

Now, in that just one episode has been released as I write this, I won’t pretend I’m hooked. It’s a rare show (Father Brown and Death in Paradise) that grabs me right from the start. But there’s promise to this 10-part Hulu series. Especially given that the writers admit they were hugely inspired by Agatha Christie…

Remember Death on the Nile? This is the same sort of thing: a locked room mystery with one victim and a finite number of suspects.

Here, we’re aboard a luxury cruise ship (still not sure where; at various points I suspected Greece, Italy, and Sardinia). Just as you’d expect, our protagonist (Violett Beane as Imogene Scott) is young and beautiful, our detective (Rufus Cotesworth played by Mandy Patinkin) aged and wise, and everyone else is as shady and sexy as twilight in July.

In keeping with Christie, there’s a definite 1930s vibe to the whole thing, despite the fact we’re clearly in the present day. Though, in just one episode, there’s already been more sex than in everything the Queen of Crime ever wrote!

Add to that a rather grisly death, and I think we may have the makings of a series that will feed my need for an it-all-turns-out-well-in-the-end murder mystery. As long as nothing like this crosses into our island’s reality, I’m happy!