To say Mick Herron is having a moment would be to ignore the past few years; let’s just say the long-tail success of Slow Horses is paying dividends. Apple has doubled down, turning now to Herron’s pre-Slough House mystery series starring private investigator Zoe Boehm. It’s a different beast than Slow Horses, but the authorial voice is still strong, and it’s a highly entertaining watch.
Down Cemetery Road begins with Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson), an Oxford museum curator who inadvertently stumbles into a web of intrigue. When a gas-line explosion in her neighborhood orphans a young girl she met once on the street, she goes out of her way to deliver a condolence card to her in the hospital, only to find that the girl has gone missing. Impulsively, she hires idealistic private investigator Joe Silverman (Adam Godley) to look into the matter. Silverman isn’t much of a PI, especially compared to his standoffish wife Zoe Boehm (Emma Thompson), who seems to have one foot out of the door of the marriage. But Silverman’s snooping bears fruit, embroiling Sarah and Zoe in a shocking government conspiracy.
A slick conspiracy thriller anchored by its appealing leads, Down Cemetery Road isn’t as tight or frantic a ride as the average Slow Horses season, but Herron’s familiar combination of acerbic humor, life-and-death stakes, and deeply sinister villainy is still very much on display. To this last point, the show boasts three effective heavies: ruthlessly inscrutable espiocrat “C” (Darren Boyd), his unlikely lackey Hamza (Adeel Akhtar), and terrifying wetwork operative Amos Crane (Fehinti Balogun). All three bring effective menace to the game, but the show lives and dies on its two stars, whose separate narrative journeys eventually converge. Thompson is predictably terrific as Boehm, a prickly cynic whose reluctance to involve herself is eventually replaced by angry stubbornness. The real surprise, though, is Wilson, a quirky civilian forced to uncover hidden reserves of resourcefulness as she awkwardly, repeatedly fails to mind her own business. As action heroes, they’re an unlikely pair; indeed, their improbable survival against the forces of professional, sociopathic violence leads to the series’ least realistic moments. But as a crime-fighting duo, they’ve got appealing odd-couple chemistry, and fortunately Apple has greenlit a second season. I’m definitely looking forward to further adventures.
