Fans of twisty murder mysteries set in stately British homes and admirers of the shrewd, plucky heroines who solve them, rejoice! A zippy new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery is here to light up the problem-solving pleasure centers of your brain. Is Netflix capitalizing on the success of its multi-film Knives Out partnership with Rian Johnson? Is it looking to compete with PBS a little bit by branching out into the Golden Age of Detective Fiction–adaptations game? Does the series’ tagline, “The queen of crime returns,” portend more cozy murder-solving on our screens in the coming years? Whatever the reason, we all benefit.

“Bundle of Love” is almost entirely exposition-focused, introducing the characters along with their emotional, social, and historical contexts, while setting the scene and stakes of the murders to be solved. Lady Eileen Brent — but please, call her Bundle — is among the bright young things of the social set, perfectly at ease in an exquisitely draped golden gown as she moves through the massive party being held at her family home. So far, so normal for the daughter of a marquess (the late Lord Caterham).

Is this going to be markedly different from Gosford Park — even a sort of murder-y Downton Abbey? Well, yes. Series creator and writer Chris Chibnall (Broadchurch, Doctor Who) has wisely chosen to emphasize the emotional hangover so many families were slogging their way through in 1925. According to the memorial where Lady Caterham still places flowers regularly, Bundle’s brother, Tommy, died in action in 1915, and the war ended just seven years ago. Bundle and her mother are still deeply haunted by the losses of Tommy and Lord Caterham, who passed away in 1920. They put brave faces on it, but Lady Caterham scarcely leaves the grounds of their estate, Chimneys.

Sadly, Lady Caterham is now land rich and cash poor, so to pay her staff and maintain the physical plant of Chimneys, she’s been forced to rent out the house for the summer to a wealthy steel magnate and his wife. Sir Oswald and Lady Coote and their new-money ways are a horror to Lady Caterham — can you believe they thanked the butler Tredwell for bringing them fresh glasses of Champagne? What next? — but money is money, and she needs it.

As a viewer, it’s a treat to be so deftly and efficiently whisked into a fictional world like this; unavoidable clunkiness is fleeting and pops up only a few times. For example, Undersecretary for the Foreign Office George Lomax hisses at his underling Gerry Wade, right in front of Bundle, that he simply must tear himself away from their sweet, flirtatious conversation to attend to Lady Coote so Lomax can continue to work on making himself Sir Oswald’s bestie. It’s not elegant, as exposition goes, but Alex Macqueen’s overprecise, officious delivery more than makes up for it, telegraphing in just a couple of lines the precise type of nitwit Lomax is.

Gerry beetles dutifully off and we get a little party-within-the-party scene of him playing bridge with Lady Coote, Jimmy Thesiger, and the Cootes’ personal secretary, Rupert Bateman. I didn’t feel any particular way about Lady Coote until the moment she almost threatened violence against him for his very gentle suggestion that she ought to keep her eyes on her own cards. She is now my fictional enemy for life. Fortunately, Jimmy is there to ease the tension with some self-deprecating humor about his failure to pass the civil-service tests. It turns out he’s always in demand as a party guest, however, thanks to his flawless dance moves.

After an ecstatic dance with Gerry, dreams of a likely proposal spinning in her head, Bundle heads to bed for the night. What a swell party it was; what grief will dash her hopes in the morning. Watching Bundle and Gerry whirl around the dance floor as a jazz band plays at fever pitch, I couldn’t help being reminded of the gulf between the perspectives of the characters experiencing the party and the contemporary viewers watching it unfold. Bundle and Gerry think they’re having a splendid evening, and with the Great War behind them and their blissful ignorance of the Great Depression and World War II yet to come, they don’t realize how close they are to the end of an era.

When Tredwell and then Bundle find Gerry dead in bed with an empty bottle of a powerful sleeping draft on the bedside table, Bundle is the only person who refuses to accept the idea that Gerry died via an overdose of any kind. He was a legendarily hard sleeper — Tommy’s letters from the front described Gerry as being able to sleep through exploding bombs, and his Foreign Office colleagues Ronnie Devereux and Bill Eversleigh planted eight alarm clocks in his room as a prank to wake him before noon — and had made special arrangements for a dinner date with Bundle to ask an unspecified question that would have been, y’know, life-changing.

Owing to a lack of any evidence that Gerry’s death involved anyone else, the inquest results in his end being classified as death by misadventure, but Bundle is not satisfied. On top of Gerry’s death destroying her romantic hopes and reviving the worst of her grief over Tommy, her moxie and sense of obligation to the man who dragged her dead brother off the battlefield won’t allow her to let it lie. Bundle is also galled by Lady Coote’s refusal to mention at the inquest that the fatal sleeping draft was from a bottle she’d given to her sleepless maid, Emily. How did it get from Emily’s room to Gerry’s? Lady Coote sniffily tells Bundle that “it does none of us any good to revisit this tragic event” and that, friends, is what we call a toxic “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Ronnie, feeling a little guilty for remaining silent about the weird discrepancy between the eight clocks he and Bill had tucked away all over Gerry’s room and the seven clocks artfully arranged on the mantlepiece, reluctantly agrees to make some inquiries about Seven Dials. Gerry referred to it in a letter he was drafting to his sister Loraine, but why would he regret divulging anything about a famously seedy London neighborhood? Could it be related to the seven clocks in his room? Or to the super-secret project Sir Oswald and George Lomax were speaking publicly about? Is it code for something else entirely?

While we’re asking questions, Bundle wants to know what’s up with a man she spots in the inquest and then again in the town square as she and Ronnie are talking. Who is he? The man clearly notices her, then notices her noticing him, and starts briskly walking away. Bundle, who I now suspect is part bloodhound, dashes off after him. He gets away, but thanks to a bit of quick thinking in a public phone booth, Bundle learns that the mysterious man had just called Scotland Yard. We’ll learn soon enough from the credits that this is Police Superintendent Battle, but for Bundle, he’ll have to remain a tantalizing mystery for a bit longer.

Later feeling her oats, Bundle announces her intention to drive up to London to meet with Ronnie and do a bit more investigating. Lady Caterham can only sigh that her sole surviving child is too much like her late intrepid husband, who we now learn is actually the same man we saw getting gored to death by a bull in Ronda, Spain, in 1920. (Does his family know the grisly details of Lord Caterham’s death?) The plot thickens further when Bundle, driving hell-for-leather down a country lane, comes across someone lying in the middle of the road. It’s poor Ronnie, bleeding out from a gunshot wound, and with his last breath, he urges Bundle to “tell Jimmy Thesiger … Seven Dials.”

Now we have two murders on our hands, and it’s time for some informed speculation. I’m eliminating Sir Oswald and Lady Coote from consideration on the grounds that they’re written as far too gauche to be mixed up in Gerry’s death. In addition to Sir Oswald thanking the staff, Lady Coote is straight-up mean to the maid she was assigned, and they talk openly about money. Perhaps worst of all, they can’t resist informing Lady Caterham that they paid for the scholarship that covered tuition for their excellent secretary, Mr. Bateman, at the same posh boarding school Tommy had attended. None of these behaviors are crimes, but for those to the manor born, they may as well be. The Cootes are basically walking around with a giant neon sign above their heads flashing “RED HERRING.” I know who I think killed Gerry, but Ronnie’s death complicates my hypothesis, and I won’t say more about my suspicions until the final episode. Gentle readers, do you have any particular suspects in mind yet?

• As Bundle and Lady Caterham, Mia McKenna-Bruce and Helena Bonham Carter are very well cast — they resemble each other just enough to be believable as mother and daughter, and McKenna-Bruce’s performance seems like a cousin to Bonham Carter’s breakout performance as Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View.

• Tredwell is played by Guy Siner, a legendary British “Hey, it’s that guy.” He’s been in a bit of everything over the decades, but I remember him best as Lieutenant Gruber from ’Allo, ’Allo!, a long-running series about French resistance fighters of varying degrees of enthusiasm outwitting the Nazis in Vichy France. A comedy, obviously.

• Speaking of Tredwell, in a robust field, he delivers my favorite line of the episode. Regarding the clocks on Gerry’s mantlepiece, he primly tells Bundle that “what a gentleman does in the privacy of his room, with as many clocks as he chooses, is his own affair!” And you know what? He’s right. Our casual disrespect for horological privacy has gone too far!

• The morning after the big party, Tredwell has wisely anticipated the needs of the very hungover young folks by putting out a serving tray of dry toast and liver salts, a new-to-me old-timey product that sounds a lot like a precursor to Alka Seltzer.

• To defend this section against baseless accusations of being little more than a Tredwell fanzine, I’ll note that this episode marks the third time I’ve seen Nabhaan Rizwan, who plays Ronnie, play a character who meets an untimely deaths.

• And finally, if you were wondering what exactly a marquess is, Debrett’s has you covered. Outside of the royal family and all their HRHs, the nobility ranking goes duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron. Pretty spiffy, in other words: Lord Caterham would have outranked fellow fictional aristocrats Anthony, Viscount Bridgerton and Robert, Earl of Grantham.