It’s an evening like any other when an explosion rips through the leafy Oxford suburb Sarah Tucker calls home.

In the aftermath, a house now stands devastated, with two adults dead and a young girl missing.

With the police more interested in keeping the neighbours from rubbernecking than in searching for the missing child, Sarah becomes obsessed with finding her.

She enlists the help of Zoë Boehm’s investigation agency, but Sarah’s and Zoë’s search reveals more secrets than answers, taking them from Oxford’s cobbled streets to the rugged outer reaches of the British Isles. As Zoë and Sarah draw closer to the truth, they are caught in a web of conspiracy and come up against government forces, cold-blooded mercenaries and vengeful loners.

‘Down Cemetery Road’ was Mick Herron’s CWA Gold Dagger winninng debut novel. I bought it in 2017, after I’d bought the first three books in his Slough House series. For some reason, it never made it to the top of my TBR pile, even though I read his other books as they were published. I was reminded of it when I saw that Apple had made the book into a TV series starring Emma Thompson. I thought, “That looks good”, and then, “Don’t I already own that?” 

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the excellent Anna Bentinck, and I was impressed by what a strong and unusual novel it was. I would never have guessed that this was a debut novel. The writing was polished, the plot was tightly wound, and the dialogue sparkled.

My only criticism was that I thought the prologue was unnecessary. I think it was meant as an enticing promise of a clever thriller with spy-adjacent skullduggery ahead, but it almost lost me because it felt competent but generic. 

By contrast, being in Sarah’s head as she suffered through a dinner party with a rich arsehole that her husband was trying to win as a client, was electrifying, and that was before the bomb went off. Sarah felt real to me. She also wasn’t at all the kind of character I’d expect to see in a thriller, which made everything more interesting. 

There are three more books in the Oxford Investigations series, although Mick Herron has moved his attention from Sarah to Zoë Boehm, the slightly spiky PI Sarah ended up working with. I’ve already downloaded the next book in the series: ‘The Last Voice You Hear’ (2004). I was sad to see that Anna Bentinck isn’t the narrator for the second book. I enjoyed her work on ‘Down Cemetery Road’.