Things have not gone well for the Hogan family since the end of the first series of the psychological crime drama Blood.

Blood's second season starts rolling out Monday on Acorn with the first two episodes (followed by an episode subsequent Mondays), and it has the same tense and eerily ominous tone as the first season.

The characters in Blood don't raise their voices much, which makes it all the more unsettling to consider what must be going on inside.

Jim Hogan (Adrian Dunbar, top), who was accused of killing his wife in the first series, returns to his family's small Irish village a year later, physically healthy and emotionally debilitated.

While he was acquitted of causing her death, he lost his medical license and much of his reputation and standing in the community.

In the wake of that traumatic series of events, we start the second season trying to sort out everyone's feelings and motives.

Equally important, we can't forget Mrs. Hogan's situation at the time of her death. The fact she was suffering from an awful degenerative neurological condition remains a critical issue because, as we begin Series 2, her daughter Fiona (Gráinne Keenan) must wrestle with the fact she has been diagnosed with the same genetic condition.

When Jim returns and asks to temporarily stay with Fiona and her husband Paul (Ian Lloyd Anderson), Fiona dutifully tries to shift her focus to helping her father put himself back together.

Fiona and Paul had already been having problems, however, many of them related to lack of money, and Jim's arrival threatens to intensify those.

Still, Fiona feels she can't shun her father, because her brother Michael (Diarmuid Noyes) is already doing that and her sister Cat (Carolina Main), who pushed the murder accusation against Jim in the first series, is understandably now somewhere else.

While all these pieces arrange themselves on the chessboard, naturally, it's the person who is trying to be most selfless and conciliatory who finds herself at the center of a whole new crisis.

Keenan plays Fiona nicely, letting little glimpses of her conflicting emotions periodically play across her resolutely calm face.

Dunbar keeps an air of mystery around Jim. Everything on the surface suggests he really is the kindly small-town doctor, benevolent to all, but every so often we see something that suggests we may not really know him all that well.

Cat seemed to be set up as the dark force in the first season, which didn't mean everything she said was wrong. She's less of a focal point this time around, yet it would be unwise to dismiss her ability to alter the course of events.

Blood focuses more on the psychology of its characters than the crimes, or alleged crimes, that set its plotline in motion. It's a course that makes the show flow smoothly and maintain an enticing air of mystery.