Down Cemetery Road is the first volume in the four-book series featuring Zoë Boehm, an Oxford private investigator.
Sarah Trafford (nee Tucker), early 30s, stay-at-home wife to a young, hard-working and successful merchant banker, is bored. When a neighbour’s four-year-old child goes missing, Sarah decides to engage a private investigator to find her. There are repercussions.
Readers who enjoy plot-driven thrillers need to show restraint and stay with Down Cemetery Road while the author sets the scene. Those who persevere will be rewarded closer to the end of the 406 pages. An experienced editor with a resolute red pen would’ve culled Mick Herron’s tendency to be long-winded without affecting his quirky writing style.
The repartee bordering on caustic between Sarah and a potential client of her husband at a dinner party is a minor highlight. The major highlights in the book are reserved for the sociopathic behaviour of the operatives who are employed by a select department that is not shown on the organisational chart of MI5. They make problems disappear. Those problems that cannot be resolved by other means.
Mick Herron is now a prolific writer, but this was his very first book published. He leisurely sets the groundwork to a mystery thriller that is written to shock. Naivety is followed by sardonic humour, plot twists, irresponsible collateral damage, actions by a ruthless Secret Intelligence Service, and we are introduced to various nefarious characters. A flawed but engrossing start to a highly popular writing career.
Down Cemetery Road has been adapted for television by Morwenna Banks with Emma Thomson as Zoë Boehm and Ruth Wilson as Sarah Tucker.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHORMick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb.
In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of “the twenty greatest spy novels of all time”.
The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
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