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Marie Phillips

Author of the novel Gods Behaving Badly, soon to be a film starring Christopher Walken and Sharon Stone. Writer, with Robert Hudson, of BBC Radio 4 series Warhorses of Letters, starring Stephen Fry and Daniel Rigby. Co-host of the Firestation Book Swap in Windsor. Writer in residence at Ackland Burghley school, London.

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The Killing 2

A weekend of retro pleasures: teaching at my old school, hanging out with my sister and her kids in the seaside town where we used to go for family holidays, shopping in charity shops, playing Simon Says, the yearly ritual of getting wound up at the Old Toupeed Man / Sexy Young Woman presentation combo of Children in Need, and watching The Killing - oh, those heady days of earlier in 2011.

Oh, The Killing 2 aka Frobrydelsen 2! Oh, plot device allowing Sarah Lund the chance to wear the same jumper every day again! Oh, the implausible-suspect-of-the-week, dismisssed-the-following-week structure! Oh, the cruel tease of reproducing the Troels / Morten / Ree triumvirate, only casting a fat moustachioed walrus in the place of sexy Troels! Oh, the other cruel tease of hiring some not-Troels but will-do eye candy and then making him criminally insane! Oh, the fun of thinking I can speak Danish! Oh, takk! Oh, kaff! Oh, the Copenhagen rain! Oh, the shaven-haired strong sensitive types of the Copenhagen police department! Oh, those Danish prisons and their sex sofas! (Really?) Oh, Danish children who are all blond! Oh, emotionally-charged scenes played out while folding laundry in tastefully decorated Danish apartments! Oh, the attempts to make the negotiation procedures of Danish coalition politics thriller-levels of exciting! Oh, the pleasing feeling of an obsession taking grip yet again!

Yes, I miss Troels (Troels!) and Theis and Pernille, and the way the Danes pronounce Nanna Birk Larson, but Sarah Lund is back and more Lundy than ever (I particularly treasured her taciturn response to Strange’s in-car chit-chat), and with any luck the disparate plotlines will cohere into something as gripping as last year but without the nonsensical ‘forget everything you’ve heard so far’ pay-off (looks like Sarah’s been dumped by her fiance, so at least we won’t get any more spurious ‘profiling’). Also so far: no puppy in a box. That’s got to be good.

What’s everybody thinking so far? Do we have a murder suspect yet? Poised blonde psychiatrist? Colonel Dad? Reverend Green in the library with the lead piping?