The stunning scenery of Yosemite National Park, sturdy performances by Eric Bana and Sam Neill and Rosemarie DeWitt’s best turn since “Mad Men” recommend “Untamed,” an engrossing murder mystery that trots through genre tropes and leans into melodrama but never stops being worthy of our attention.

It’s a tale about crimes of the present re-entangling people trapped by pasts destined to catch up with them. Murders, dormant investigations, wildlife being wild and secrets and lies are uncovered in one of the most gorgeous with the most gorgeous backdrop imaginable.

The Aussie Bana, star of two similar Australian Outback detective thrillers (“The Dry,” and “Force of Nature”), is perfectly cast as Kyle Turner, an Investigative Services Branch detective with the National Park Service at Yosemite, a grizzled man’s man outdoorsman who likes to investigate his cases — deciding or not if this fall, that mauling or disappearance is a crime — by horseback.

He’s a loner, divorced, a dad given to long life-lesson conversations with his little boy. We quickly figure out that the kid’s been dead for five years. We guess that’s when ended his marriage (DeWitt plays the realtor wife, remarried but suffering in her own way), sent Kyle into a bottle and has him teetering on the edge of suicide.

Hunting for his child’s killer broke him, and now some law firm’s investigator is asking him about his mental state all those years ago, when a man disappeared in the park and somebody is aiming to file a “wrongful death” claim about how the case was mishandled.

His boss (Sam Neill) is ever-understanding and indulgent, protecting Kyle from the park’s PF-conscious Director Hamilton (Joe Holt), grabbing the car-keys when he’s had too much.

Kyle needs to be sharp as the park’s had a high-profile death on El Capitan, the climbers’ Mecca in the midst of all this untamed nature. We see that plunge in a gripping/shocking opening scene. As the series progresses, Kyle pieces together bits of the back story that put this young woman on that summit and sent her over the edge there.

No grizzled investigator can pursue a case without a newby by his side. Lily Santiago of TV’s “La Brea” plays Vasquez, an L.A. cop and single mom and new-to-wilderness park ranger assigned to shadow and assist him. We will see many of the dazzling vistas and the unforgiving nature of the beautiful terrain and its critters (digital deer and bears) through her eyes.

So much can go wrong in a remote, forbidding place where natural dangers abound and there are no witnesses to the unnatural ones.

“How do we catch them,” then, Vasquez wants to know of those responsible for this disappearance or that “accident?”

“We don’t.”

The “jumper” will face a coroner’s probing and Kyle’s astute observations, which carry out into the wild as he retraces her last hours and days.

Other deaths and disappearances will be introduced into the mystery. There’s a drug problem in and around the park, with sketchy characters linked to it. A wildlife management officer (Wilson Bethel) comes off as a prickly rival for Kyle’s “man of the wilderness” title. Kyle’s rubbed more rangers than just Milch (William Smillie) the wrong way.

But maybe weathered Native American employee Jay (Raoul Max Trujillo) can keep Kyle on the right path, in between cracks about being on “the white man’s” payroll on land stolen by “the white man.” And Vasquez brings enough to the table to make the park service veteran question his limits and methodologies as a sleuth.

“So what might the next move be for a cop down in LA?”

I love the ways our hero picks up the scent and traces the victim’s plight, his clever way of collecting a ballistics sample and how the script fleshes out a fairly straightforward story with colorful characters and ugly turns.

Not every plot element — arcane nature “experts,” hippy camper “communes, the drug business, the grisly manner of most park deaths, disappearances on a mostly-wilderness acreage “the size of Rhode Island,” PR management with one of the most popular tourist destinations on Earth, park ranger and police heirarchy, wildlife management and Native American culture — is given its due in the six episodes of this sometimes overreaching script.

The creators, Mark. L. Smith “and Elle Smith, have “The Revenant”
(Mark) and “The Marsh King’s Daughter” (both of them) adaptations on their credits and this has more “Marsh” about it than you’d like — a few contrived twists too many.

Characters save other characters in the nick of time almost like clockwork.

Fans of detective tales will be able to tick off the tropes — “suicidal” (“Lethal Weapon”) cop, green partner, a “Clue” cast of suspects, some of whom we never ever meet. The structure of the script tips us about where this is going in key respects early on, even if the writers try to give those conclusions a twist or two we don’t expect.

And I have to say that rarely has a limited series finished with an episode that seemed less necessary than the anticlimactic send-off these two series creators created for episode six.

But Bana is riveting as the lead, DeWitt gives the series the saga the pathos it begs for, Santiago measures up as more than a “Training Day” trainee and Bethel, Trujillo and Neill shine in support.

They lift “Untamed” to the level of “a good beach read,” in miniseries form, a trip to Yosemite focused purely on everything that can go wrong there and the people who have to piece together what happened when it does.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Eric Bana, Lily Santiago, Rosemarie DeWitt, Wilson Bethel, William Smillie,
Raoul Max Trujillo and Sam Neill

Credits: Created by Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith. A Netflix release.

Running time: Six episodes @:50 minutes each