Detective shows are often full of clichés. Arguably, that’s one of the things fans like about them, the comfy predictability only occasionally laced with something new. One popular device: Set your murder mystery in a sunny vacation destination—a Caribbean island, the south of France—and slather on the scenery for a combination of whodunit and armchair travel. (The rain-plagued Brits are especially keen on this sort of thing.) But HBO’s Get Millie Black, set in Jamaica, is not that kind of show. Created and written by the novelist Marlon James, the five-episode series features no sun-drenched beaches or umbrella-ed cocktails. Instead, the action takes place in the grittiest streets of Kingston, where survival requires every shred of wit, strength, and ruthlessness the city’s underclass denizens can summon.

The title character (Tamara Lawrance)—inspired by James’ own mother, a Jamaican detective inspector—carries some of the usual TV-cop baggage. As a girl, Millie tried to defend her little brother Orville (Chyna McQueen) from their abusive mother and as a result got shipped off to England, where she eventually joined the police. Believing Orville to be dead, she returns to Kingston 18 years later after discovering that he’s not. Or, rather, that only the name is dead. Orville is now Hibiscus, a transgender sex worker who lives in the Gully, a dry paved canal bed running through the city, and Get Millie Black’s emblem of Jamaica’s paradoxes. The Gully is a dangerous place, especially in a city rife with homophobic violence, where same-sex activities are still illegal. But in the Gully Hibiscus also finds a community that means more to her than the suburban house Millie inherits when their mother dies.

Millie’s guilt over being forced to abandon Orville makes her a compulsive crusader, intent on saving the lost and vulnerable, particularly children. She and her partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), a semicloseted gay man, catch a missing person’s case—a teenage girl named Janet (Shernet Swearine)—and Millie is instantly hooked. They discover that Janet had been involved with the ne’er-do-well scion of one of Kingston’s rich white families, so their investigation takes them on a tour of Jamaica’s racial and class caste system. Interfering with their search for the girl is another white man, a Scotland Yard superintendent, Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), who wants to turn the rich kid into a witness against the criminal outfits with which he has been dabbling. “Here to colonize our investigation?” Millie quips when introduced to Holborn.

There’s a sturdy detective story running through Get Millie Black, but what makes the series stand out is how James uses the form to achieve something similar to his 2014 masterpiece, the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings. That novel offered a polyphonic portrait of Bob Marley’s Jamaica, also enriched with a complex, fraught relationship between two sisters. (No man has any business writing about how sisters talk to and feel about each other as accurately as James does.) Get Millie Black uses voice-over, a device that critics of hard-boiled crime fiction often dismiss as a narrative crutch. In this series, however, a different character voices each episode, revealing aspects of themselves they conceal from one another and the world. Hardly anyone in Millie’s orbit is exactly what they seem to be, but their hidden reserves contain much more than ulterior motives and secret agendas. Janet in particular becomes a new girl in almost every scene, yet thanks to Swearine’s fierce performance, each new facet remains utterly convincing.

Then there’s Millie herself, splendidly played by Lawrance as a mercurial obsessive forever treading on the brink of disaster. The driven detective who pursues truth and justice in defiance of protocol and municipal politics is yet another crime-fiction cliché. As Millie cajoles information out of her former partner back in London, alienates the rich and influential with her blunt questions, and neglects the relationships that ostensibly mean the most to her, she’s in familiar TV-cop territory. But viewers used to getting exasperated with the long-suffering wives and dementia-addled parents of TV detectives—characters with the annoying habit of interfering with the unfolding of the plot—may be surprised to find themselves siding with Millie’s loved ones for a change.

James writes Millie as a kind of addict. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she adeptly coaxes the sweet bartender she’s been dating into sheltering a witness even though they both know she’s putting him in danger. The series’ director, Tanya Hamilton, takes the time to linger on the faces of the people in Millie’s life as the realization lands that she won’t hesitate to use them. She fails to visit her partner in the hospital after he gets shot because she’s so intent on proving that their missing-person case leads to a human-trafficking ring. She tries to stash Hibiscus—her reason for returning to Jamaica in the first place—in their late mother’s house as if her sister were a precious object to be stored instead of a person desperate to live her own life. Millie has a habit of staring at videos of the trafficking victim she’s trying to find whenever her zeal starts to flag—again, typical TV-detective behavior, but Lawrance also conveys that for Millie, the compulsion to rescue is truly a fix.

So much of Get Millie Black is familiar, but what makes the series fresh is the conviction it brings to the genre’s pro forma tropes. TV detectives are forever wrecking their personal lives in their single-minded service to the plot, and rarely does the audience really care. We don’t switch on an episode of Law & Order to see detectives eating dinner with their families at a reasonable hour, after all. But most TV detectives’ private lives seem well worth sacrificing to feed our appetite for the puzzles they solve. Get Millie Black—with its indelible characters and vivid performances—actually makes you feel how much Millie stands to lose.