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Dublin Murders is a 2019 TV adaptation of the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French. It's a joint production with Britain, Ireland and the US under The BBC, RTÉ and Starz. The show stars Killian Scott, Sarah Greene, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Moe Dunford, Sam Keeley and Antonio Aakeel. It is scheduled to show eight episodes, which adopts storylines taken from In the Woods and The Likeness.

The show starts when the An Garda Síochána reopens a cold case after a university archaeological team uncovers the remains of missing children who were never found in 1985 with one survivor, who can't remember what really happened. The boy, named Adam, is moved to study in Britain and later returns under the name Rob Ryan to avoid media publicity and move on from the past.

Partnered with Cassie Maddox, they work together to investigate the missing children. At the same time, Cassie is forced back to her first days as a plainclothes officer in undercover ops against Irish organized crime when the Gardaí call in the corpse of a murdered woman... who looks just like her.


This show provides examples of:

  • Arc Welding: Happens due to In the Woods and The Likeness both being adapted to be part of the same overarching case. It turns out that Mr. Andrews, an agent of the company building the motorway, was responsible for both making threatening phone calls to Jonathan Devlin and attempting to make a deal with Lexie to buy her share of Whitehorn House. Notably, in the original novel, the latter role was played by Daniel March's cousin.
  • Adaptational Jerkass: Rob. He comes across as far more arrogant, intimidating and cruel than he ever was in the book, for instance, shamelessly exploiting a junior officers "man crush" on him. He's a womanizer, with a bit of a misogynistic streak. He's even shown to be prone to violence.
    • Cassie shows a bit of this too, albeit not as much as Rob. She has a bit of a cruel streak in her particularly when she hurts Sam by maliciously revealing that she slept with a target during her undercover days.
  • Adaptation Name Change: Rob Ryan becomes Rob Reilly, Lexie Madison becomes Lexie Manigan, and Raphael Hyland becomes Raphael Lahiri.
  • Adaptational Nice Guy: Quigley comes across as a far nicer guy here, compared to the asshole he's been shown to be in the books.
    • O'Kelly also counts, retaining most of his Reasonable Authority Figure traits, but seemingly less volatile or sexist than he appears to be in the novels.
  • Hallucinations: Rob happens to see a wolf going around and near him sometimes when he's alone working.
  • Compressed Adaptation: The Likeness gets this treatment, compared to Ín the Woods.
  • Heroic B So D: Cassie suffers this a bit in the final episode, after killing Daniel March.
  • Named by the Adaptation: Murder Squad chief O'Kelly gets a first name in the series - Brian.
  • Sanity Slippage: Steadily happens to Rob as he continues to investigate the Knocknaree case.
  • Two Lines, No Waiting: Thanks to adapting both In the Woods and The Likeness, the Gardaí are tasked to investigate what happened to the missing children from 1985 while a case that involved Cassie's old undercover operation is found with a dead woman who looks like her.
  • The Unreveal: Much as in the book we never find out what really happened in the Knocknaree woods in 1985. Also, we don't learn about Lexie's true identity and history, something which was actually revealed in the book.
  • Wham Episode:
    • The 4th episode alludes to Cassie having memory problems on whether she has a twin despite publicly telling her colleagues that she doesn't. At the same time, she decides to go undercover again to determine what her doppelganger was doing.

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