There's Been A Murder:Karen Pirie.

There's been a murder. A young woman's body has been found in the grounds of St Andrews cathedral. She's been strangled and her stomach cut open. The murder took place in 1996 and twenty-five years later it remains unsolved but when Bel Richmond (Rakhee Thakrar) creates a series of successful podcasts about the case the police quite simply have to reopen it.

DCS James Lawson (played by Stuart Bowman as an older man and by Kevin Mains as a young DS back in  '96 - there's a lot of this so I'll distinguish with a slash as we go on, oldest first) and Simon Lees (Steve John Shepherd who you may remember from This Life), an officer of unspecified rank, charge the relatively inexperienced DS Karen Pirie (Lauren Lyle) to the case.

It is Karen Pirie who provides the name for Gareth Bryn's new drama based on a Val McDermid book and currently available on the ITV Hub (so you get an exhausting amount of irritating Go Compare and Intel Evo adverts interrupting the action) and it is her job to find out what really happened on the night that Rosie Duff (Anna Russell-Martin) died.

It's Pirie's biggest job so far and she's understandably nervous about it. She's not been given the biggest team to work with. She's joined by Jason Murray, or 'Mint' (Chris Jenks) and, later, by DS Phil Parhatka (Zach Wyatt), an ex-lover of hers who is a touch peeved he wasn't offered the case instead.

In the small hours of Thursday 27th June 1996, following a night when the pubs had been full of Scots celebrating Gareth Southgate's missed penalty against Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, Rosie's body was found by three of her friends and they soon became, not least because their shirts are all covered in blood, the chief suspects.

Tom 'Weird' Mackie (Michael Shaeffer/Jack Hesketh) was a party animal who now lives a quiet life as a university lecturer. Ziggy Malkiewicz (Alec Newman/Jhon Lumsden) was, in 1996, a history student but is now a celebrated surgeon, a committed jogger, and happily married to his devoted husband Paul (Gary Lamont). Alex Gilbey (Ariyon Bakare/Buom Tinhgang) is the solitary Englishman of the group and a rare black face in St Andrews. He's now an artist and lives a quiet life with his wife Lynn (Marnie Baxter), Weird's sister.

All three men are adamant they did no harm to Rosie and the blood on their shirts comes from their attempts to save her. The first police officer on the scene, Janice Hogg (Gemma McElhinny) joins a team, with the ambitious young DS Lawson, headed up by DI Barry MacLennan (Gilly Gilchrist). They take the three lads in for questioning but, ultimately, are unable to find a culprit so the case is closed.

Pirie has to cover much old ground before things start happening and that is reflected in a drama that starts quite slowly but by the end had me gripped. At first it was hard to see where this was going and many of the red herrings (I mean, there's a character whose nickname is Weird) just seemed a bit too red and I started to wonder if they were actually elaborate double bluffs. But as the story progressed I found it got tenser and tenser. There were chilling moments and moving ones too. Towards the very end, and a resolution I did not see coming until quite late into Karen Pirie, I was even a bit choked up.

DS Karen Pirie discovers that Rosie, unbeknownst to her friends, had a baby as a teenager and put her up for adoption (Bobby Rainsbury plays Grace Galloway as that, now grown up, baby) but there's no record, anywhere, of who the biological father is. Rosie's brothers, Colin (Gerry Lynch/Daniel Portman) and Brian (Antony Strachan) are known to the police and have a fearful reputation. They were known to be highly protective of their sister to the extent of throwing people down wells.

Nevertheless, when Janice Hogg starts a romance with one of them, Colin - later marrying him, she is removed from the case by her superiors. That's a lot of material for both us, and for, confident to the point or arrogance, podcaster Bel to be working with. When it turns out that Ziggy, Alex, and Weird all have their own secrets, some they even keep from each other, then the picture gets even muddier.

It turns out they've not been entirely truthful in the past but that doesn't, surely, make one of them the murderer? That's for Pirie, egg eating Mint, and Parhatka to discover but, of course, there are a hell of a lot of twists and turns along the way. Some of them, it has to be said, more believable than others.

Despite some cliched maverick cop shit, the story is told brilliantly. St Andrews looks beautiful, 1996 is well captured (police Rovers, wild parties, people dancing to Common People, The Drowners, and The Only One I Know, very dark offices, and those Army & Navy shirts with flags on the sleeves that New Model Army fans used to wear) and the modern day talk of optics, woke millennials, and Karens rings true even if it appears the makers are trying a bit too hard here.

Emer Kenny as Pirie's friend and housemate River Wilde seems something of a superfluous character and mainly serves as a device so that Pirie can tell her, and us, her thoughts on the case. That seems a likely breach of police regulations but elsewhere it's all good. The theme (by Arab Strap, Arab Strap! On primetime ITV!) is great, there are some well considered thoughts on the nature of trauma and grief - and some very moving depictions of both, there's an interesting look about how the Internet can simultaneously be a force for both good and bad, and there's the very important message, we hear it so often now but it still needs repeating, about how violence towards women is not a female problem, it's a male one.

Ultimately, though, Karen Pirie is a really good whodunnit. One that takes a while to sink its teeth in but when it does refuses to let go. In that way, the series Karen Pirie is like the character Karen Pirie whom Lauren Lyle so brilliantly portrays. With McDermid having written several more Karen Pirie stories, Lyle could find herself in this job for the long run.