Showrunner Lisa McKee has followed up her rollicking comedy Derry Girls with another rollicking comedy, but one with mystery, mayhem, and a touch of murder. This review has only mild spoilers referring to the show’s basic plotline; no twists are revealed here.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is a comedy/mystery series, currently on Netflix, starring Roisin Gallagher as Saoirse, Sinéad Keenan as Robyn, and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Dara, three friends in their late 30s, who, when they went to school together, participated in an act so reprehensible – and illegal – that it cannot be fully disclosed until almost the end of the last episode of the 8-part series.

The mystery they buried long ago gets unearthed when the estranged fourth member of their girl gang, Greta (Nathasha O’Keeffe) dies. The gals decide to carpool from their home in Belfast to scenic County Donegal, where Greta lived. Once there, they realize there is something seriously hinky about the circumstances of her death, and the plucky threesome decide to investigate.

Perhaps decide is the wrong word there. Saoirse, who writes a popular television crime drama, wants to investigate, and she goads the other two into leaving their lives in Belfast behind for a spell to stay in the small town near Greta’s house for better access to a growing pool of suspicious characters, starting with Greta’s strangely intense husband Owen (Emmett J. Scanlan) and her mother Margo (Michelle Fairley).

As this storyline runs its course, a second parallels it, showing us the four girls (Greta included) as their younger selves. The show teases out the circumstances leading up to whatever terrible thing they did. The casting of the younger versions of each woman (Emily Flain as young Saoirse, Chara Aitken as young Dara, Maria Laird as young Robyn and Emma Canning as young Greta) is absolutely spot-on, especially in the case of young Dara.

As they investigate, their lives and relationships grow even more fraught, tangled, and mysterious, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have fun along the way. These are ladies who like to play as hard as they work, and the trouble they get themselves into is inventively bonkers. Saoirse, who has a fiancé back home, gets way too flirty with an extremely handsome local cop, Liam (Darragh Hand), all while someone with seemingly sinister motives has taken an extremely keen interest in their ham-handed search for the truth about what really happened to Greta.

The mystery itself is revealed slowly but not dragged out enough to cause the viewer to become impatient. And though the main plot is interesting, it’s not really the point of the show. This is a story about three (sometimes four) friends and their love/hate/love relationship with themselves and each other. Their dialog is snappy and profane (in the best possible way) at times, the actors playing Dara, Robyn and Saoirse fully inhabit their characters and make them seem real, if a bit over-the-top, and the action is intense and surprising, and often incredibly funny.

That it’s funny is not surprising given McKee’s pedigree; her breakout hit series was Derry Girls, about a group of five friends at a Catholic girls’ school in Derry, Northern Ireland, during the “Troubles” of the 1990s. That show, also on Netflix, is also worth a watch for being gut-bustlingly funny and full of heart. The accents get a little hard to understand at times, but the use of subtitles solves that problem handily.

You may want to have the captions on for this one as well. How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is currently streaming all eight episodes on Netflix.