Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

 

A gas explosion in a quiet suburban Oxford street shocks everyone. A husband and wife are dead, and their young daughter is hospitalised. The only problem is that the husband died four years earlier, and the child has disappeared from the hospital. Neighbour Sarah Trafford is convinced something strange is happening and is determined to find out more.

I'm a huge fan of Mick Herron's Slough House/Slow Horses series (you can find my reviews for all the books on my blog), so the rest of the author's books are something I've planned to read when I can find the time. The news that Down Cemetery Road has been made into a TV series forced my hand as I'd much rather read the book before watching a series.

Down Cemetery Road is the first book in the Oxford series and features private investigator Zoë Boehm. When I read the book, I was surprised how little Zoë Boehm features; bored housewife Sarah Trafford is the main protagonist, and she teams up with Boehm's partner, Joe Silvermann. Boehm makes a brief appearance at the beginning of the novel and then returns for the last third of the story.

It is difficult not to compare the novel with the Slough House/Slow Horses series. The intelligence service features, but it is clear that much of what they do is secretive and unpleasant. The humour is dark, with plenty of sarcasm and irony. Down Cemetery Road was the author's first novel, written seven years before the first Slough House book, and it feels very much as if Boehm is an embryonic Jackson Lamb.

The mystery behind the explosion is intricate and sordid, with lots of red herrings to keep you baffled. A range of characters keeps you on your toes, as it is impossible to know who is trustworthy. Two huge twists involving big characters certainly astonished me. Throughout everything is Sarah Trafford's tenacity and foolishness to find answers; how can someone come back from the dead, and what happened to the child? The search for answers is an extremely dangerous one.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well the book is adapted for TV, but I'm even more interested in seeing how the character of Zoë Boehm develops over the rest of the Oxford series.

Author Details

Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have been published in over twenty-five languages and are the basis of the award-winning TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Among his other novels are the Zoë Boehm series, also now adapted for TV starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, and the standalone novels The Secret Hours and Nobody Walks. Mick’s awards include the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Gold, Steel and Diamond Daggers. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.