4/5 stars

“With friends like these, who needs enemies?” is the overriding sentiment in Light the Night , an enthralling 1980s-set Taiwanese drama series from Lien Yi-chi and Ryan Tu, set in Taipei’s seedy red light district.

Ruby Lin and Cheryl Yang are both wonderful as childhood friends who run a Japanese hostess bar, and the show charts the tumultuous relationships between the staff and its customers in the lead-up to, and fallout from, a shocking murder.

Netflix premiered the first of three eight-episode seasons of Light the Night in November, and it has now reached its climax with a series of thrilling revelations.

Season one opens with the discovery of a woman’s body on a hiking trail outside Taipei. It quickly becomes apparent that the victim is one of the hostesses from Light, a Japanese-style club in the city that offers flirtatious companionship.

Owned by Ching-yi (Yang), known as Sue to her customers, and managed by Yu-nung (Lin) known as Rose, Light is already under surveillance by Detective Pan (Yo Yang) as part of a drug-dealing operation, so the investigation of the young woman’s death also falls to him.

Season one ended with the revelation that the victim is Sue, who we have seen through a kaleidoscope of flashbacks make enemies of all her colleagues, not least Rose.