when the neighborhood got spooky
Sarah Tucker was having a dinner party when the house down the street blew up. She was resenting her husband for making her play housewife to him and his client Gerard and his trophy wife. She had been out of work since the small publishing house she worked at had closed, but she would find something else. She wasn’t just going to stay home all the time. Even if her husband Mark’s career in finance was taking off and he was acquiring clients like Gerard, she still was going to find something for herself.
The whole evening had been a disaster. The trophy wife had appeared first, early and overdressed. Mark had asked Sarah to invite some of their friends as well, so she had chosen her oldest friend and her new husband. Sarah knew that Mark had wanted her to invite some of their more sophisticated friends, not Wigwam and Rufus, looking like hippies and willing to argue like them too. But Sarah was upset with Mark, so Wigwam and Rufus it was.
Gerard had been the last to arrive that night, and he started arguing with Sarah and then Wigwam almost immediately. It wasn’t until after the meal, when Sarah was serving coffee, that they heard the explosion. Gerard said it was a bomb. The house down the street was destroyed. Sarah tried to remember if anyone had lived there. It wasn’t until the next day that she found out that the women who had lived there had died but there was a child, a young girl, who had survived the blast.
In the days that follow, Sarah is haunted by the memory of that girl. Sarah thinks she saw her at the park feeding the swans. She wanted to make sure the girl was okay. She tried to go to the hospital, but the girl wasn’t there any longer. She had been released into the care of social services, but they have no record of her. Sarah ends up going to a private investigator and hiring him to help find the child. It’s in his office that Sarah first meets Zoe. Zoe is not an assistant or very helpful, and she leave before Sarah can hire the detective.
But Zoe appears to Sarah again, weeks later, after the investigation has lead them down a rabbit hole. After the private investigator has been killed. After Sarah’s life is in danger also. It’s with Zoe’s help that Sarah pieces together everything that happened. And it’s only with Zoe’s help that Sarah will make it out of her current situation alive.
Down Cemetery Road is the first book in Mick Herron’s Oxford based novels centered on enigmatic investigator Zoe Boehm. She knows how to move through the world of spies in order to find the truths they try to hide. In the upcoming television series based on these novels, Zoe will be played by the inimitable Emma Thompson, who wrote a stunning introduction to this novel, and I cannot think of anyone who could embody this character so fully.
Down Cemetery Road is full of the same bright and enchanting writing that has made the series Slow Horses (Slough House, if you’re reading them) such a beloved show. These characters leap off the page from the start, and the expert narration of Alix Dunmore drew me in from the start. She can handle Herron’s snark, she can handle the intelligence, she can handle it all with such precision that she will forever be the voice of Zoe’s novels in my head. I had such a fantastic time listening to this book, and I am counting the days until the television show is available for me to devour.
An early copy of the audio book for Down Cemetery Road was provided by RBMedia through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine, and I bought a copy of the Kindle book myself.
