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I was re-reading Minette Walters’ debut mystery novel The Ice House” recently, and then I re-watched the BBC mini-series, which came out in 1996, starring Corin Redgrave and a not-yet-famous Daniel Craig as the police, Penny Downie, Frances Barber, Kitty Aldridge as the women, and Baby!James!d’Arcy, presumably fresh out of drama school, as Downie’s son. Both book and mini-series have their faults, but one thing that’s interesting, and I don’t think can be said very often, is that the mini-series is actually quite a lot better than the book in some ways.

Short version, with some spoilers but as few as possible. Phoebe Maybury (Penny Downie) lives at Streech Grange in rural Hampshire with her two oldest friends (Frances Barber and Kitty Aldridge), and village gossip has it that they’re in a lesbian ménage-a-trois. Village gossip also has it that Phoebe killed her abusive husband David 10 years before, when he disappeared without a trace. The police investigated her extensively at the time, but with no body and no direct evidence were forced to eventually let the matter drop. Now a badly decomposed body has turned up in Phoebe’s ice house. Phoebe and David have 2 children, 20 year old Jonathan, a medical student in London, and 18 year old Jane, who’s just started university and is recovering from anorexia.

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