Shetland is Britain’s nearest equivalent to Scandi noir, thanks to the treeless countryside, heroic coffee drinking and chunky knitwear. But despite it being one of the BBC’s most consistently popular (and exportable) crime dramas, the formula was interrupted when, last series, long-serving lead Douglas Henshall was replaced with Ashley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder.

A Shetlander by birth but returning home after a stint with the Metropolitan Police, Jensen’s new copper dragged a whole load of the metropolis back with her to the Scottish archipelago. The drama lost some of its distinctive sense of place in the process, becoming a bit of an “anywhere” crime drama – not ideal for a series named after its setting.

But good news – the new ninth series appears to have settled back into a familiar groove. It certainly feels like it’s more relaxed former self, helped by no longer needing to unpack Calder’s back story. Speaking of which, in a clever opening scene, we had a brief recap and an update.

Speaking to an unseen interlocutor who we were meant to assume was her therapist, Jensen’s character was in full confessional mode. She explained why she had finally decided to move permanently back to Shetland, and gave a handy recap about her family situation (her brother Alan is a local priest). It was then revealed that she wasn’t speaking to a therapist, but addressing the wrong end of a shotgun being shakily wielded by a distraught young man, Malcolm, who had just blown away his own brother.

Calder’s colleague DI Alison “Tosh” McIntosh (Alison O’Donnell) came to her rescue before the major storyline kicked in: the disappearance of Tosh’s friend, Annie Bett, and her young son Noah. Annie had left her husband Ian, a property developer (a common red flag in crime series like this), and the couple were seen arguing at a party the night before she vanished.

The two guest stars were House of the Dragon‘s Vincent Regan as a mussel farmer who had been housing Annie and Noah since they bolted from the family home, and Ian Hart (The Responder) as Annie’s old Oxford maths tutor. He had flown up to Shetland after having received a distressed message from his former pupil. “You travelled 750 miles on the back of a voicemail?” asked an understandably sceptical Calder.

Calder’s abrasive, unsmiling demeanour may have reminded fans of Henshall and the departed DI Jimmy Perez’s habitually wintry disposition. And she made for an odd-couple pairing with the warmer, more emollient Tosh – “You’ve got a tendency to over-praise people,” Calder told her boss.

The other regular coppers have less screen time this time – DC Sandy Wilson (played by real-life Shetlander Steven Robertson) was dispatched to do a lot of the off-screen legwork, while the avuncular Sergeant Billy McCabe (Lewis Howden) made one fleeting appearance. I prefer a more restricted cast of characters – last series I lost track of who was who.

There were three dead bodies by the end of the episode, as Annie and a French man called Anton Bergen were added to the toll along with Malcolm’s late brother. Were Annie and Anton lovers? Where is Annie’s husband Ian (Robert Jack), and just why has Annie’s old Oxford maths tutor flown all this way? All will be revealed, but with five more episodes to fill, all in good time.

With no Tarantinoesque gangster fly-ins, Shetland seems more promising this time around. And with plenty of those sweeping treeless vistas, enviable fishermen’s cottages even a scene at a ceilidh (complete with kilts and Highland dances) it seems to have rediscovered what gripped us in the first place.