Midsomer Murders

A reclusive couple find their lives coming under police scrutiny after a social services investigator is killed. Barnaby finds out about generations of family secrets and has to decipher astronomical charts to discover the identity of the killer. Barnaby's wife arrives in the village as the head teacher at a local school.

Inspector Barnaby's birthday is soon coming up, and Tom is reminded that he's nearing the age when his father died prematurely of a stroke. He starts thinking about his existence and how he wants to spend the rest of his life. Together with Joyce he goes to Midsomer Health Farm for a peaceful weekend. His weekend naturally ends up far from being peaceful...

This is John Nettles' last episode of Midsomer Murders.

The death of the maid of honour at an upper class wedding poses a challenge for Barnaby and Jones. These people are not used to having the police around asking a lot of silly questions. Barnaby has Cully's wedding to prepare for and things are not working out according to plan.

Nick Cheney was once a successful director, but he has now ended up mainly directing low-budget films. We meet him as he is directing The Scarlet Pimpernel at Magna Manor. A former convict, Jed Norris, has been hired as a security guard on the film set, and one night he finds the director dead, beheaded by the use of a guillotine.

When solicitor Nick Turner falls to his death from a roof, Barnaby and Scott must discover if it is suicide or murder. Nick had money problems and rival lawyer Otto Benham was spreading rumours that he was stealing from clients. One night, Otto is drugged and made into a human target in the middle of his croquet lawn, then fired on with bottles of vintage wine using his replica Roman catapult. The elaborate murder looks like revenge - but what for?

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Jamie Cruickshank, a bartender at the Maid in Splendour public house, is keen on Bella Monday, a barmaid, and follows her to a tumbledown old cottage in the woods, only to be blasted with a twelve-bore shotgun. Then the pub landlord's son, Stephen Bannerman, is also killed in the same way. Barnaby finds there was ill-feeling between locals and newcomers to the village and also between the landlord and his aggressive son, who was in the process of taking over the business.

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Midsomer Barrow landowner Gareth Heldman is murdered with an Iron Age spear, on the same spot where his father was killed many years before during an archaeologists' dig at the village's prehistoric earthworks. Meanwhile, troupes of new age travellers (whom Heldman strongly disapproved of) are arriving to celebrate the summer solstice on June 21st.

Barnaby finds Heldman was a womaniser, with a tangled web of offspring. He also has to reopen the file on the thirty-year-old murder of Roger Heldman and investigate a tale of lost treasure.

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Barnaby's new partner, Sergeant Dan Scott, arrives from London's Metropolitan Police and expects to have a quiet life. But then the murders begin. The first victim is Fiona Thompson, stabbed several times with a long knife on her way home from a flamenco night at Midsomer Mallow village hall - and a witness reports a mysterious squeaking noise at the scene of the crime...

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The Barnaby-Troy partnership is about to come to an end, as Troy has passed his inspector's exam and is moving on. However, the murderers of Midsomer go on piling up the bodies.

Joyce Barnaby gets trapped in a fallen canal tunnel, and in getting her out seven skeletons come to light in a hidden chamber. Meanwhile, two local tearaways are shot dead in the woods at Midsomer Worthy, and a tramp called Tom is accused of the killings. While Troy looks into the shootings, Barnaby wrestles with an old mystery. And although six of the skeletons found in the tunnel date from the 18th century, one is much more recent.

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Someone is decimating the ancient Smythe-Webster family of Upper Walden, and the bad blood between the villages of Upper and Lower Walden is renewed with a vengeance.

First, young heart-throb actor Larry Smith (alias Laurence Smythe-Webster) dies in an explosion at a publicity event for a new film. House of Satan is based on a book by a local writer, the late Ellis Bell of Lower Walden - a village whose inhabitants are referred to by its Vicar, the Reverend Simon Smythe-Webster, as "the weasels of the wild wood".

The next to die is Larry's uncle, House of Satan producer Frank Webster (Francis Smythe-Webster), electrocuted to death on his exercise bike. Finally, Barnaby's principal suspect, Danny Pinchel, the family's cook, is drowned in a large bowl of tomato soup...

Barnaby realizes he is dealing with an historic grudge, and he enquires into the family's antecedents.

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Barnaby's wife, Joyce, finds a dead body on the Midsomer Florey village green while taking part in a watercolour painting class, and she recognizes it as the elderly Miss Fairfax.

Barnaby is given the case, then finds himself taken off it and replaced by a team from the National Intelligence Squad, while he is assigned to deal with a missing handbag. However, he continues his investigation into the murder, finding deceit and double-dealing. It appears that 'Miss Fairfax' was not an elderly spinster at all, but a young detective sergeant from the National Intelligence Squad working under cover, and that her colleagues are busy fitting up the village handyman for the murder of an old lady who never was.

He discovers that someone is busy hunting for some five million pounds still missing from an old robbery. In the closing moments, Barnaby has to lock two of the National Intelligence Squad's officers in a bank strong-room, where they are trying to snatch the missing cash, and to arrest the head of the Squad's operational team for the murder under investigation.

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Accusations of unsportsmanlike conduct on the river are bedevilling the Midsomer game fishermen, and Barnaby has to interview elegant widow Isobel Hewitt, a spendthrift, fast-living, Jaguar-driving 75-year-old, when another lady fly-fisher accuses her of a violent assault. Then first Isobel and later her fellow villager Dr Duncan Goff are found on the river-bank with their skulls smashed in, and there is no shortage of suspects - including an antique dealer who apparently specializes in befriending elderly widows.

The picture is confused when one of the suspects, chef-restaurateur Keith Scholey, is found frozen to death in his walk-in deep freeze, with the lock of the door jammed by a nail. Troy has a theory that Scholey was the killer and has made his suicide look like murder, but will that be the end of the affair?

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In the village of Midsomer Wellow, someone is killing off the bellringers of the parish church, in the week before a big bell-ringing competition. One young woman on the team is even shot dead in the churchyard on her wedding day.

Before he can crack the case, Barnaby has to understand the significance of an old killing in the same village in the year 1840, when the Midsomer Wellow Vicar of the day, the Reverend Jonathan Ebbrell, was murdered and thrown down a well by the bellringers of his church. So where are the Ebbrells now?

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''''Then barbiturates are stolen from Raif and Georgina Canning's veterinary surgery and the district nurse is found in her crashed car in a confused state. Barnaby and Troy dash to the Manor, fearing the drugs theft may be connected to the death threats - but they find Melissa is already lying dead by the swimming pool with a syringe in her stomach. Now they have a murderer to find.

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A postman is brutally murdered on his morning round in the hamlet of Goodman's Land. Local WPC Jay Nash helps Barnaby and Troy to establish that Dave offered a very personal service to the female villagers, leaving a trail of jealous husbands in his wake, and it becomes clear that the tiny village is riven with other adulterous affairs. Then the body count begins to go up...

Meanwhile, romance is blossoming between Troy and Jay.

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Dr Burgess, on his way home from a party at the glamorous Francesca Ward's riding school, knocks a stranger down in the road at Newton Magna, and the stranger mysteriously vanishes. Barnaby identifies the missing man as Sean O'Connell, a disgraced Irish vet, then he recognizes the village's new squire as Melvyn Stockard, a retired villain. A body found in a well proves to be the father of the man Stockard's daughter is about to marry... everyone knows he was against the marriage, but is Stockard a killer, and where does the missing Irishman fit in?

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A man's naked body is found in a crop circle, then another dead man electrocuted at the wheel of his vehicle, and then yet another dead man in another crop circle. Barnaby is not impressed by rumours of extra-terrestrial killings, and is sure he is dealing with a human murderer. Before he can solve the mystery, he has to fathom a forty-year-old rivalry in love, the vengeance of the loser, and the defences of the winner.

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Barnaby attends the funeral of the owner of the Easterly Grange Hotel and hears that the hotel manager has gone missing. The will is read, and it seems the hotel has been divided between the missing manager and his beautiful wife, the hotel's chef and its accountant.

A dog finds the hotel manager's severed hand, and the others named in the will receive threatening notes. Then accidents start to happen to them all, including mushroom-poisoning, an apparently accidental shooting, a falling drinks cabinet and a sabotaged vehicle. Barnaby next learns that the missing hotel manager had in his possession a more recent will, which is also now missing....

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The Inkpen family has bought back its ancestral home, Inkpen Manor at Midsomer Deverell, and they plan to turn a village Memorial Garden on their land into a tea shop. This causes consternation in the village, and the Bennetts (who previously owned the manor and founded the Memorial Garden) lead the opposition. Then young Fliss Inkpen-Thomas is found dead in the Memorial Garden with her skull smashed in, and a few days later her mother Elspeth dies of poisoning, with the possibility of suicide firmly denied by her family and friends.

Barnaby investigates the deaths and finds older and more deep-seated motives for murder lurking in another ancient family.

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The sleepy village of Martyr Warren is invaded by quarrelsome New Age travellers, some of whom fall out with Hector Bridges, a local magistrate. The police are well aware of the tensions, but matters come to a head when Hector is found shot dead. It quickly appears that he was feared by almost everyone in sight, including his own family. And there is more to the travellers than meets the eye - one of them is a former British army officer who fought alongside Hector in the Falklands War... Then (as so often happens to Barnaby and Troy) another dead body is found, this time that of an old man at the travellers' camp.

Meanwhile, Barnaby is not feeling in full fighting trim for murder investigations, as Joyce has put him on a strict diet to lose weight.

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Troy is in the Midsomer Worthy cricket eleven for the annual match against Fletchers Cross, so he is on the spot when the wife of Robert Cavendish, the Team Captain and a big local landowner, is found bludgeoned to death with a cricket bat. As often happens, the death toll mounts before the killer can be unmasked. Why should the cricket team's scorer be stabbed to death with a Nazi dagger at the following match?

Cavendish, as a mine owner, may have been responsible for the 'accidental' deaths of two of his employees in years gone by. If someone is out for revenge, who is it?

Meanwhile, a protest march to maintain footpaths across Cavendish's land finds a foot-bridge has been sabotaged, and their leader takes a ducking...

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Barnaby and Troy are in Badger's Drift again, this time to investigate the murder of an unpopular property developer called Richard Bayly who had been suffering from a brain tumour. Bayly had recently come up with plans to build a new housing estate in the sleepy village, despite determined local opposition, and he was killed with an Indian sword belonging to Stephen Wentworth, the local Vicar.

Another interesting factor is the recent arrival in the village of Simon Fletcher, a theatre director with unhappy childhood memories and perhaps an old grievance.

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A craft centre in the old mill at Morton Fendle is losing money. Several locals have invested in the business and believe they have been swindled by Alan Hollingsworth, the man behind it. When Hollingsworth's glamorous wife Simone goes missing, Barnaby believes she has been kidnapped and puts Hollingsworth under observation. However, Hollingsworth evades the police, carrying a bundle of cash, and a woman neighbour who follows him to his rendez-vous is killed in a bizarre road accident. Then Hollingsworth is found dead, and Simone turns up alive. Barnaby guesses she and a friend faked the kidnapping, but he can't prove it.

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The body of Agnes Gray, a woman who loved only animals, is found in the river - but she did not drown. And then her cousin Esslyn Carmichael is tricked into killing himself on stage during an amateur production of the murder mystery Amadeus.

Barnaby has to get to grips with clues which include adultery, dramatic ambition, stolen religious art, and large donations to animal charities, before unmasking a killer who proves to be mad.

Meanwhile, love begins to blossom between Cully Barnaby and Nico Bentley, one of the cast of Amadeus...

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