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Last week, I reviewed Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot by Alexis Hall. Tina listed her favorite books of 2025 and discovered that six of them were set in the British Isles!

Ludwig on BritBox and The Marlow Murder Club on PBS both feature amateur detectives who are puzzle constructors in their normal lives before those lives get upended by murder.

Ludwig plays up the puzzle aspect much more than The Marlow Murder Club. John Taylor uses the pen name ‘Ludwig’ for his popular puzzle books. His reclusive and orderly life is disrupted when his twin brother James, a police detective, goes missing.

Lucy, James’s wife, recruits John to impersonate his brother while the two of them work together to figure out what happened to James. At first, John intended to just grab some information from James’s office, but he gets pulled into a murder case and suddenly discovers that his puzzle skills are perfect for solving mysteries.

I wanted to watch Ludwig because Anna Maxwell Martin plays Lucy. I loved her in The Bletchley Circle. I enjoyed her in this role, too. I don’t think I encountered David Mitchell, who plays John, before this show. He is known best as a comedian. That makes sense! Ludwig is a police show, but with a lot of humor.

Each episode of Ludwig has its own murder case, but the missing James is an overarching theme through the six episodes. The season reaches a satisfying conclusion, but James is still not home. I’m glad that we’ll get a second season to continue to work through that mystery.

The Marlow Murder Club is less about puzzles and more about the sisterhood of three women who join together to solve a mystery. I love shows about strong women working together for good. The women prove to be an asset, but I loved this line from the police detective, that’s shown in the trailer: “You couldn’t have just started a book club, could you?”

The first season of The Marlow Murder Club was four episodes investigating one case. The second season was six episodes investigating three cases, two episodes per case. We’ve been promised a third season which will follow the same format as the second. PBS has a whole page about the third season, but not an exact date for when we’ll get to see it. Some time in 2026.

The Marlow Murder Club is based on a series of novels by Robert Thorogood.

Ludwig is set in Cambridge, one of my favorite English settings for shows. The Marlow Murder Club is, naturally, set in Marlow, a beautiful town along the River Thames in Buckinghamshire.