About Return to Paradise
Return to Paradise is an Australian cozy crime series that premiered on ABC in September 2024, an antipodean spin-off of the long-running BBC whodunit Death in Paradise. It follows Detective Sergeant Mackenzie "Mack" Clarke, a brilliant London Metropolitan Police detective who returns, under a cloud, to her sunny coastal hometown of Dolphin Cove after being accused of mishandling evidence in a high-profile English case. What was meant to be a brief, face-saving retreat becomes something far more entangling once the bodies start turning up.
Each episode is built around a self-contained murder puzzle in the classic fair-play tradition: a closed circle of suspects, a clutch of misdirections, and a final drawing-room-style reveal in which Mack lays out exactly how the killer was caught. The tone stays deliberately light and non-graphic, leaning on character comedy, gorgeous beachside scenery and the friction of a big-city cynic reluctantly reintegrating into a small town where everyone remembers who she used to be.
Beneath the case-of-the-week structure runs a serialised emotional thread. Mack must work alongside her former fiance, forensic pathologist Glenn Strong, navigate a prickly relationship with her by-the-book superior Senior Sergeant Philomena Strong, and confront the family history and old wounds she left town to escape. The series was created by James Hall, Peter Mattessi and Death in Paradise originator Robert Thorogood, and airs in the United Kingdom on BBC One.
