Having read all Mick Herron’s Slough House books in advance of seeing the fantastic TV adaptation, I decided — more or less for logistical reasons — to reverse the process for the author’s earlier series about private investigator Zoe Boehm. The first season of Down Cemetery Road was a highly entertaining mystery vehicle for Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson; with season two nearing its release, I thought I’d catch up on the first novel in the series.
Mick Herron’s Down Cemetery Road (2003) is billed as a Zoe Boehm mystery, but its primary actor is Sarah Trafford, a disgruntled housewife in Oxford whose marriage and sense of self worth are both slowly deterioriating. On the night of a truly ghastly dinner party, a nearby house in the neighborhood explodes, and a young girl — injured in the blast — mysteriously goes missing. Sarah develops an unexpected fascination with the missing girl, who she sets out to find, engaging private investigator Joe Silvermann to help. Her poorly understood decision not only blows up her own personal life; it puts her in the crosshairs of nefarious secret-service agents working to bury a grotesque military conspiracy.
Down Cemetery Road is a hell of a first novel, especially in its earliest stages, when it builds — with equal mastery — the intriguing mystery and the nuanced, unsatisfying life of Sarah. Going into the TV adaptation with no expectations, I was surprised by Sarah’s dominance of the narrative at Zoe’s expense; the real surprise, though, is that Zoe became the key figure in the novel series, given how offscreen she is for much of the novel. It’s a fascinating read for those familiar with the show, which made numerous interesting, usually smart decisions to update the story for visual media. A larger role for Zoe was one major element; the other was a significant restructuring of the final act, which is perhaps the weakest element of the book in how it meanderingly maneuvers the key players to a resolution. Herron’s novels aren’t always five-star gold for me, but they haven’t steered me wrong yet, and it’s easy to see from Down Cemetery Road how the author has forged such a long, successful career.
