Menace and Murder: A Lynda La Plante Collection

Combining three vintage British TV programs from the pen of the writer best known for Prime Suspect, this anthology proves to be a mixed bag. The best of the trio is Mind Games, a 2001 feature-length telefilm starring Fiona Shaw as a former nun now working as a police profiler, who takes on the case of a serial killer murdering middle-aged women in their own homes. Although the denouement is almost incredibly complex, Shaw’s committed performance endows the plot with a genuine human dimension. The four-part miniseries Killer Net (1998) is comically dated in its depiction of Internet activity, but the tale of a group of college students—including a young Paul Bettany—who make the mistake of playing a malevolent video game remains creepily effective. The weakest offering is also the longest, Supply and Demand, which began as a 1997 telefilm about British agents foiling a drug-smuggling operation, and was expanded the following year into a six-part miniseries with Miriam Margolyes starring as the head of the undercover team. Divided into three two-episode arcs, the first one, "Raw Recruit," centers on another drug-smuggling ring, but the second, "Golden Goose," focuses on unsavory activities at a notorious London club, and the third, "Blood Ties"—easily the most interesting of the bunch—features Richard Johnson as a British defector who returns from exile in Russia for reasons that the team must unravel. Supply and Demand is essentially a series of procedurals filled with rather dull sequences of suspects’ movements being tracked via surveillance cameras; it’s understandable why, despite Margolyes’s presence, the series was cancelled after a single season. A strong optional purchase. (F. Swietek)