The youngest of the CSI series and already into its seventh year with Gary Sinise still at the head of the unit as blunt speaking widower Mac Taylor, opening episode The 34th Floor concludes the Vacation Getaway cliffhanger that ended the previous season, revealing the gunshot heard over the end credits was fired by Lindsay Monroe rather than Shane Casey (farewell Edward Furlong), thereby ending his reign of terror.

Fast forward five months and the episode introduces the lab’s new member, former FBI agent  and DNA expert Jo Danville (Sela Ward), the sexy divorcee know it all replacement for Stella Bonasera who’s left to run the New Orleans lab (since Melina Kanakaredes didn’t renew her contract, don’t expect another spin-off). Danville’s thrown into things pretty sharply when she finds a young woman’s body on the building’s 34th floor, the one immediately below the lab’s.

It’s not the most complex of cases to set the season rolling but things do pick up with successive episodes that variously offer a wide range of incidents that see lab technician Adam Ross briefly suspended, Medical Examiner Sid wounded, a run in with a detective from Barcelona, the discovery of a nightclub in a trailer full of party guests at the bottom of the Hudson river, murder victims  at clubs, elite private schools, food festivals, and even a department store’s window display, and Mac’s run in with superiors over a sniper and the public’s right to know about danger. And even a killer clown.

Inevitably, there’s several  plot s that implausibly hinge upon characters from past cases or with links to the team, even if they’ve never actually appeared on screen before.  Thus, this  season  brings an appearance of Jo’s ex husband, an attack on the lab as part of a 17 year vendetta,  and, in Nothing For Something’s missing person case, a cameo by Peter Fonda as Mac’s old partner that leads to Mac and Danny being investigated by Internal Affairs.

Fonda’s  not the only famous face dropping by for a guest slot, Edward James Olmos turning up as a Puerto Rican gang leader (who Mac had, naturally arrested for murder some years before) and both Adrienne Barbeau and, as a suave hitman, rapper Ne-Yo in an episode taking its title from Michael Jackson’s  Smooth Criminal.

It does rather overdo the coincidental links to lab members this time, what with Jo’s adopted daughter becoming a key witness and prompting a clash between personal and professional concerns, and the murder of NYPD Chief Carver’s (John Larroquette) missing sister. Inevitably too, unresolved old cases get revisited, notably with the season’s climax and the series’ 150th episode,  Exit Strategy, taking Mac (recovering from a  near death experience) back to a 2002 robbery and new evidence of a kidnap for a closing note of redemption.

Never quite as dark as CSI:Crime Scene Investigation or as flippant as CSI: Miami perhaps, but Sinise always feels a far more convincingly flesh and blood character than his opposite numbers while the series also benefits considerably from intense performances by Carmine Giovinazzo  as Danny Messer  and Eddie Cahill as  Don Flack.

Season Eight kicks off Stateside this month, so it’ll be interesting to see if the writers develop the relationship between Mac and Jo into deeper realms, but meanwhile this is an ideal opportunity to get up to speed and work out which of the minor characters are likely to make a return in forthcoming episodes.