ROLAND WHITE reviews Anna Pigeon Mysteries: This mystery is overshadowed by its spectacular Rocky Mountains setting

Anna Pigeon Mysteries (U&Drama)

Rating: Three out of five stars

The term cliffhanger was supposedly coined to describe the moment in Thomas Hardy's A Pair Of Blue Eyes when a young man finds himself dangling from a cliff face.

He is rescued by plucky heroine Elfride Swancourt, who tears up her voluminous bloomers and knots them into a rope. Rather racy, you might think, for readers of the early 1870s.

The plucky heroine of Anna Pigeon also found herself clinging to a mountainside in the first episode of this series, set in Montana's Glacier National Park.

Modern undies aren't designed for heavy rescue, and to make matters worse the person at the top of the cliff threw a large boulder at her.

But yet again, it was a lover who came to the rescue. A hallucination of Anna's late husband appeared and gave her a rousing pep talk. Fired up by this, she dragged herself to the top of the cliff, despite a dislocated shoulder.

When she was married, she worked as a stage manager in New York. Who knew theatre folk were so tough and resourceful?

The series is adapted from the novels of Nevada Barr, a former actress who also worked as a national park ranger. It's filmed in the Canadian Rockies and the scenery is absolutely spectacular. Imagine the Lake District on powerful steroids.

The trouble is, the scenery rather overshadows the action. Tracy Spiridakos is very watchable as Anna, and her FBI agent friend Frederick is so cool that he can disarm a petrol station robber while chatting on the phone. But this is very much a run–of–the–mill whodunnit.

When a fellow ranger is found dead in the park, everybody except Anna thinks she was mauled to death by a cougar. She is virtually ordered off the case by her boss, who is like all bosses in detective dramas.

An obvious suspect emerges. We know he's a bad boy because Anna had earlier told him off for dropping a banana skin, and he is eventually traced to a tent in the middle of nowhere.

As we were only 20–odd minutes into the action, it was obvious that Anna and her colleague Harlan were going to find the suspect very dead, which they duly did.

When a dead pigeon turned up on Anna's doorstep, that was surely a big clue that the baddie was one of Anna's colleagues. It turned out to be Harlan, who was mixed up in poaching.

As he held her at gunpoint, he was distracted by a wild animal and she managed to stab him in the neck with a sedation dart.

And this is the difficulty I have with Anna, who has worked in five national parks over three years. She is obviously clever, strong, resourceful, and knows her own mind. Is this really the sort of woman who, however consumed by grief, would keep running away from her past?