More than 40 years later, the dramatic events surrounding the disappearance and the hunt for the killer resurface when a high-flying TV journalist makes a documentary about the case. As much as I admire Juliet Stevenson's performance and her acting talent, I believe the film should have stayed faithful to the excellent book which I read after watching the film. The very first script didn’t have a daughter either and I loved it when I read the second draft and discovered she is a struggling single parent, going through a difficult time. Her thriller series featuring criminal profiler Tony Hill has been adapted into the much-loved TV series Wire in the Blood. The series was nominated for The UK TV Dagger at the 2009 Crime Thriller Awards, and star Juliet Stevenson was awarded Best Actress on 21 October 2009.

At the same time as the prison’s final rebuild in 1782, the site for London’s public gallows moved from Tyburn (in the modern day West End) over to Newgate Prison. The story is about a documentary maker (Stevenson) who delves back half a century into the mystery of a missing child for which her step-father was hung for murder. The script was just one of the appeals of the drama for Juliet: “There was a lot going on sub-textually. This is an extraordinary achievement, and it's sure to be on many lists of the best mysteries of the year.Place of Execution– written by Val McDermid and adapted for TV by Patrick Harbinson was made into a 3-part TV drama starring Juliet Stevenson and Greg Wise. As a result, some judges would cross their fingers whenever they said the phrase as a result of concern for the criminal's soul as they said it as a prayer. This later developed into "may God have mercy upon your soul", which was used as the traditional closing sentence by judges passing the death sentence in England and Wales, Canada and Australia. The actors chosen to play the "older" versions were uncannily like their younger counterparts, especially George Bennett. A winner of the United Kingdom's coveted Gold Dagger Award (for The Mermaids Singing, 1995), McDermid ranks high among the growing number of crime fiction authors who are carving out a sort of "British noir" -- a subgenre in which the morality of the investigators' behavior is often more in question than that of the criminals'.

The well-established method of dispatching enemies of the state was by subjecting the victims to the delights of being hanged, drawn and quartered. I did not have pleasure of reading any novel by McDermid before watching the 150 minutes PBS production of her novel Place of Execution but I believe, the film is a success.

In particular, Anne Boleyn received extra-special treatment; to make sure her death was as quick as possible an expert swordsman was brought over from France. There to be hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes. No such luck – the stress of investigating the case and the revelations that come with it are enough to turn Catherine back to cigarettes and into a sixties-esque fug of smoke. When Mary, the eldest child of Henry VIII, became queen in 1553, she attempted to reverse all of fathers ‘wrongs’ and enforce the wholesale conversion of England back to Catholicism. The adroitly layered complexities of this story come undone slowly, ominously, with smallish, wonderfully subtle hints, and possibilities – a word here, a detail there, a fleeting look.

Soon Alison's bloodstained clothing is discovered in a long-forgotten cave, and a similarly bloodstained weapon turns up hidden in the squire's library.

Fast- forward forty years to the present, when filmmaker Catherine Heathcote is reexamining the crime in a documentary for TV. Location manager Gareth Williams and production designer Claire Kenny did a great job of creating our fictional village of Scardale. In NZ this was broken into two episodes which is perhaps why I couldn't figure out/remember Catherine's early relationship with the Manor.