Although thrilled to discover that the talented Mick Herron has written another series besides the fabulous Slough House books, I was nonetheless a tad embarrassed to find out that “Down Cemetery Road” was actually published in 2003. Before the Slow Horses series.
I mean, for crying out loud, where have I been all these years? Decades actually.
Anyway, better late than never etc etc, and I have just finished “Down Cemetery Road”, rudely shushing my husband who wanted to tell me our flight was further delayed, exactly as I headed into the final pages of this remarkable book.
Perhaps because I started the book on a long flight, then continued as I fought off jet lag, I found the beginning a wee bit slow and with, sometimes, almost redundant detail, but as the book proceeded, the tension was slowly ratcheted up and the end was – clichéd as it sounds – a page turner.
The inexorably intertwining plot lines and lives of Sarah Tucker and the people she meets as she tries to make sense of the disappearance of a little girl are powerful. A bit like a spider’s web, we the reader, as well as Sarah, get drawn further and further into a shadowy world of fear and death and deception. And at the heart of it all are people with hidden identities, with vicious agendas, with references to the horrors of the Gulf War – a world unknown to Sarah, but one she cannot now escape. She, and later Zoe Boehm a private investigator, although they are both, to a certain extent, flawed young women, are trying their best to be decent people, but circumstances lead them into a world of violence and horrors.
They make an interesting foil to the largely self-serving, amoral men with whom they come into contact.
Michael Downey is a cleverly drawn character, frightening, ruthless, very dangerous, but with a commitment to the one decent act he can do, namely find the same little girl that Sarah is looking for.
A dramatic book, one that gripped me to the final paragraph, and yes – I’m definitely reading the other books in the Zoe Boehm series.