Magpie Murders, Episode 1

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Susan is working when Andreas turns up to surprise her. Their affectionate reunion introduces a relationship with room for spontaneity, before the return to London brings decisions about work and the future. Charles Clover tells Susan that Alan's new manuscript has arrived and offers her the chance to lead the publishing company after a sale. Susan welcomes the book more readily than the corporate responsibility.

Reading at home, she discovers that Pünd has been diagnosed with an inoperable tumour. The prospect of losing Clover's most valuable fictional detective alarms her. Within the manuscript, Joy Sanderling visits Pünd and his assistant James Fraser. Her fiancé Robert Blakiston quarrelled publicly with his mother Mary shortly before Mary died at Pye Hall. Joy fears that villagers will turn an angry exchange into an accusation of murder. She supplies an alibi, but Pünd declines the case.

Alan's journey home reveals how many relationships he has damaged. He is impatient with readers, clashes with his neighbour and has a son angry enough to damage his car. At Abbey Grange, his relationship with James Taylor is ending. James packs up and leaves. Alan's own cancer diagnosis supplies a disturbing parallel to the fate he has written for Pünd, although the people around him do not know about it.

Claire, Alan's sister and former typist, asks to work for him again. While he takes a telephone call, she examines his manuscript and discovers an insulting portrait of herself in Clarissa Pye. The scene turns reading into an injury: a book that entertains strangers can humiliate someone who recognises its source. Claire and the manuscript are gone when Alan returns.

Susan reaches the end of her copy and discovers that the final chapter is absent. Andreas has another announcement: he wants to leave teaching and help run a hotel in Crete. Susan is reluctant to abandon London. On Monday, her missing-pages problem becomes much more serious. Alan's solicitor Sajid Khan has found him dead below the tower at his home.

A letter appears to explain the death as suicide. DS Locke accepts that reading more readily than Susan does. She notices the mismatch between its handwritten contents and typed envelope, and questions the circumstances of the fall. Charles cannot supply the lost ending. Susan decides to travel to Suffolk, where her sister can put her up, and look for the pages herself.

The missing ending now has two consequences: a book cannot be published, and a death cannot be understood.

• The screen version intercuts the two timelines from the start.
• Pünd becomes Susan’s visible imaginary companion on television.
• The proposed corporate buyout is an addition to the novel.

The change in structure makes television a companion puzzle from the outset: viewers move between Susan reading and Pünd investigating instead of remaining for an extended uninterrupted stretch inside the embedded novel. That affects suspense even when an individual clue survives unchanged. The buyout gives Susan a career decision with a deadline, allowing the missing ending to threaten something more immediate than a late publication.