Anthony Horowitz’s seven-part series pairs Stefan Kowolski (Mark Strepan), a Serious Fraud Office trainee, with Rash Sayyad (Ben Tavassoli), a junior detective, after both stumble onto a pharmaceutical cover-up that reaches the Department of Health. Their bosses—SFO director Anna Chancellor’s icy Eleanor Davies and police DI Dorian Lough’s weary Martin Heywood—would rather the pair stayed in their lanes, but the duo keep trading files across London’s glass towers and council estates until the cases bleed together.
Each 45-minute episode targets a different scam—fake malaria drugs, dodgy dialysis contracts, money-laundered NHS budgets—yet the through-line is the same: white-collar criminals hiding behind government contracts while street-level dealers take the fall. Horowitz keeps the tone light, letting the leads bicker over who pays for coffee while evidence is tampered with in the background; Mark Addy’s droll DS Sands provides weary adult supervision.
The show was shot on location in Canary Wharf and Wembley, giving the thriller a glossy travel-brochure sheen that makes the graft feel safely fictional. Rag’n’Bone Man’s “Wolves” plays over aerial shots of the Thames, the only memorable flourish in a score by Neil Davidge that otherwise fades into Muzak. BBC One burned the episodes off across seven Thursday nights in summer 2016, then quietly let the option lapse; no second series was commissioned and the cliff-hanger finale, with Stefan’s visa about to expire and Rash framed for murder, remains unresolved.
Production Details
BBC One / 1 Season / 7 Episodes / 2016
Created by: Anthony Horowitz
Writer(s): Anthony Horowitz
Producer(s): Eve Gutierrez[1]
Main Cast
Ben Tavassoli as Rash Sayyad
Mark Strepan as Stefan Kowolski
Anna Chancellor as Eleanor Davies
Mark Addy as DS Sands
Ariyon Bakare as Marcus Johnson
Mark Bonnar as Peter Mayhew
Matt Bardock as Mark Craig
Aiysha Hart as Leila Sayyad
Kimberley Nixon as Alison
Dorian Lough as Detective Inspector Martin Heywood
Mandana Jones as Nasreen
Kumar Muniandy as Indian Doctor
