Inspector Lewis Series 5 Premieres Sunday, July 8th, on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery!

Inspector Lewis returns to PBS's Masterpiece Mystery! this weekend with the first of four new episodes in its fifth season.

In "The Soul of a Genius" and airing this Sunday, July 8th — check your local listings — botanist Liz Nash (guest star Nadine Lewington) discovers a corpse in the woods downriver from Carlyle College that has been ritually buried with a watch inscribed in Latin and a cross fashioned from sticks. The murder victim, Oxford English professor Murray Hawes, was known around the university as a harmless eccentric obsessed with Lewis Carroll's cryptic poem The Hunting of the Snark. This legendary theological and philosophical work, Hathaway elucidates, presents an impossible quest in which the hunters don't know what they're looking for, yet the danger is in finding it. Scholars and monomaniacs alike have devoted their lives to cracking The Snark's unfathomable code.

And so Detective Inspector Robert Lewis (Kevin Whatley) and Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox) embark on an impossible quest of their own, from the Oxford botanical gardens, where Hawes regularly foraged for meaning, to the office of Carlyle's Reverend Dr. Conor Hawes (Alex Jennings), Murray's estranged brother. Conor makes no secret of his bitter rivalry with Murray, but he is somehow connected to a secret society at Carlyle College, an exclusive club whose coveted membership two goth students, Vincent and Mia, are desperately trying to secure.

In a case already mired in layers of mystery, Lewis contends with another obstacle, the maddening amateur sleuth Michelle Marber (Celia Imrie). This self-styled Miss Marple attempts to redirect suspicions to a local medical researcher, Dr. Alex Falconer (James Fleet), but Michelle too harbors secrets. Hathaway, equally enamored of the philosophical text and botanist Liz Nash, is restless. But when a second death brings the inscrutable into terrifying clarity, Lewis and Hathaway move to catch the killer and put the soul of genius to rest.

Watch a short preview of the episode below.