Who killed Anais's father in A Remarkable Place to Die? Two men were already in prison for it when episode one began
Let's get one thing straight about Queenstown: the mountains are gorgeous, the lake is gorgeous, and absolutely everyone is lying about something. That's the deal A Remarkable Place to Die offers you in its very first episode, when Detective Anais Mallory rolls back into her hometown wearing the specific facial expression of a woman who does not believe a single word of the official record.
And the official record, on paper, is tidy. Her father, Charles Mallory, was murdered years ago. Two men went to prison for it. Case closed, justice served, nothing to see here — which, in a four-episode crime drama, is television for "oh, we are absolutely seeing about this."
The tidy version, and why Anais never bought it
The men behind bars are the Souter brothers, with Alan Souter as the face of the conviction — the guy Anais eventually gets on a prison phone line, dangling a face-to-face meeting like a treat. The show frames it exactly the way ScreenHub's review did: a crime that's supposedly solved. The brothers did swing the blows. That part was never the lie.
The lie was everything around it.
The actual answer (spoilers, obviously, darling)
The finale flashback lays it out: Charles had stumbled onto a meth lab operating out of a rental property. Instead of calling the police like a man with a normal survival instinct, he took hush money — and then asked for more, because he had expensive hobbies and, delightfully, a woman on the side. The Souters were sent to "change his mind." It went the way these visits go.
And the person paying the bills for all of it? Luke Staunton. Anais's ex-fiancé. The man who married her best friend. The man who spent four episodes doing smoldering eye contact across crime scenes.
The brothers were the fists. Luke was the wallet. And the wallet kept spending: when Alan became a loose end, Len Snapes was sent into that prison to close the account permanently — on Luke's orders.
So the full answer stacks up like this:
- The Souter brothers physically killed Charles Mallory during a shakedown gone wrong;
- Luke Staunton ordered and financed it to protect his drug operation;
- Len Snapes later murdered Alan Souter behind bars to keep the whole arrangement quiet.
Season 2, which has just started rolling out, doesn't pretend none of this happened. Creator Philly de Lacey told the NZ Herald that "we needed to pay off what happened in season one in season two" — before the show, in her words, wipes the slate and chases something darker. Given that the new run was expanded to six feature-length episodes, Queenstown's body count is clearly a growth industry. Charles Mallory would've asked for a cut.
Previously we wrote: Where does A Remarkable Place to Die take place? The real New Zealand town it's both set and filmed in
