The brilliant Nadine Garner leads the cast of The Blake Mysteries: Ghost Stories, wherein she is the titular Blake setting out to solve some murder mysteries.
The Blake Mysteries: Ghost Stories is the sequel to The Doctor Blake Mysteries, the hit crime drama series that starred Craig McLachlan as police surgeon and mystery solver Lucien Blake, and Nadine Garner (City Homicide, Blue Water High) as Jean Beazley, Lucien’s housekeeper.
Lucien and Jean finally got married in the feature-length episode “Family Portrait,” which brought the series to a close. (This final episode is now available for streaming in the US on Amazon Video.)
Ghost Stories is set two years after the events in “Family Portrait.”
November 1963. President Kennedy has been assassinated and the world is in mourning. Also grieving is Jean Blake, as her beloved Lucien disappeared eight months ago.
In Ballarat, a troop of boy scouts is on a camping trip, one that wouldn’t be complete without scary stories around the campfire. More frightening than any ghost story about Stanton House, though, is what one of the scouts finds there while on a dare.
Another shocker comes when the scout’s father, another camp guardian in addition to the scoutmaster, makes a gruesome discovery in the woods.
In the span of less than an hour, two men are found dead — one clearly murdered — less than a mile from each other.
Chief Superintendent Matthew Lawson (Joel Tobeck, Secret City) leads the investigation with help from new team member Constable Peter Crowe (Joshua Orpin, Titans), Sgt. Bill Hobart (David Whiteley, Jack Irish), and recently-appointed police surgeon Dr. Alice Harvey (Belinda McClory, Corridors of Power).
Despite push-back from Matthew, Jean gets involved in the investigation initially because she has links to both of the deceased. One had requested a meeting with her at Stanton House, while the other is connected to someone at City Hall, where Jean is now the first and only woman on Ballarat’s city council.
Both Matthew and Jean find it curious that the man who wanted to meet with Jean died soon after Martin Carver (Tom Wren, Secret City), the new editor of The Courier, wrote and published an article about the history of Stanton House, while another in his “unsolved crimes in Ballarat” series has a link to the homicide victim.
Here’s the thing: Carver’s series includes four articles, so there could be two more victims in the making in Ballarat.
Before Lawson solves the first two crimes — and before he utters a hurtful, gasp-inducing statement to Jean — one of the potential victims becomes an actual one, bringing the murder count to three.
The cast includes Emma Annand (Night Shift), Alan Brough (Kath & Kim), Christopher Bunworth (Bed of Roses), Matthew Connell (Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries), Gyton Grantley (House Husbands), and Julie Nihill (Blue Heelers), as well as Ian Rooney (Underbelly), who reprises his role as club barman Cec Drury.
The Blake Mysteries: Ghost Stories premieres in North America tomorrow, Tuesday, May 28, exclusively on BritBox and the BritBox channel on Amazon.
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