Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 1/1/2003; ISBN 9781841196206; PUBLISHER: Constable; First Printing edition; PAGES: 317; UNABRIDGED (Hardcover Info from Goodreads)
-Digital: COPYRIGHT ©: (1/1/2003) (8/28/2003) 4/1/2009; ISBN: 184119620; PUBLISHER: Soho Crime; PAGES: 321; UNABRIDGED. (Kindle Info from Goodreads & Amazon)
*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: (1/1/2003) 8/1/2020; PUBLISHER: Isis Publishing LTD./Audible Audio; DURATION: 13 hours, 46 minutes; Unabridged; (Audiobook Info from Amazon/Audible)
-Feature Film or tv: Not that I’m aware.

SERIES: The Oxford Series / Zoe Boehm Book 1

MAIN CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Sarah Tucker – Protagonist in her early 30’s
Mark Tucker – Sarah’s husband
Wigwam – Sarah’s close friend
Rufus – Wigwam’s new boyfriend and fiancé
Gerard Inchon – Marks potential client
Paula Inchon – Gerard’s wife
Maddie Singleton – victim of explosion
Dihan Singleton - child
Thomas (Tom/Tommy) Singleton – former soldier, target of explosion
Michael Downey – comrade of Tom Singleton, former soldier
C - Official
Howard – agent of officials
Amos Crane – agent of officials
Axle Crane – agent of officials
Joe Boehm – private detective
Zoe Boehm – Joe’s wife

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED. I got an email newsletter representing Michael Connelly that included some information about an interview he’d be doing with Mick Herron. This was recommendation enough, so, I looked for Mick’s first book. This one.
-ABOUT: After a slightly confusing bit about a man in pain in some sort of medical institution, it shifted to the Tucker couple, with Mark and Sarah Tucker arguing about two of the evening’s guests that she’d invited to join Mark’s potential client and his wife, the Inchons, for dinner. Sarah asserted that no one but Wigwam and her new beau/fiancé, Rufus, had been available. Mark felt that his upscale guests would not mix well with her casual, bohemian friend, Wigwam, and who knew what Rufus would be like.
As the evening evolves, we learn that the potential client is opinionated and rude, that Sarah is bored with her life, and it seems that she and Mark are chronically at odds. An explosion jolts them all into action, leaving the house to investigate the cause.
There’s mystery and mayhem in the offing and Sarah finds herself in the center of it.
-OVERALL OPINION: Detractors were that at times it seemed intentionally confusing, and there were moments I wanted to say “get to the point,” but as a debut novel, it’s good. It held our (Don and I listened together) interest, had interesting characters, and action. We’ll keep going with the author.

AUTHOR:
Mick Herron (From Wikipedia)
Mick Herron is a British mystery and thriller novelist. He is the author of the Slough House series, early novels of which have been adapted for the Slow Horses television series. He won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger award for Dead Lions.
Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English.[1][2][3]
In 2003, Heron published his first novel, Down Cemetery Road. It was the first volume in a four-book series about Zoë Boehm, an Oxford private detective.[4]
In 2010, he began the Slough House spy series with the first volume Slow Horses. The series concerns MI5 agents who have been exiled from the agency mainstream for various failures. The second volume, Dead Lions, published in 2013, won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger award.[2] Herron has stated that the lead character, Jackson Lamb, was influenced by Reginald Hill's Andy Dalziel.[5][6] As of December 2022, the series includes eight novels, plus several associated novellas, and events in related novels. Early volumes have also been adapted for television.
Slow Horses was published by Constable in 2010, but the firm declined the opportunity to publish the next book in the series in the United Kingdom due to disappointing sales of its predecessor. Soho published the Slough House novels in the United States, and John Murray started republishing the series in the UK from 2015.[7]
Herron's short stories have been regularly published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and some are collected in the book, All the Livelong Day, published in 2013.

NARRATOR:
Julia Franklin (From U Library)
“This is one of the loveliest and most challenging jobs for any actor and Julia Franklin is a passionate enthusiast for audiobooks. She has read everything from romance, historical fiction, sagas and "chick lit" to gritty detective fiction and thrillers. She has combined this with a busy career in broadcasting as a TV and radio presenter and as a voiceover artist. "There are," she says, "few things more exciting than starting a new book and feeling it beginning to work its magic."”
-I couldn’t find any bio info on Julia. My initial trouble with the narration, may have had nothing to do with the particular narrator, but it jumped from scene to scene without any announcement of chapter change or elapsed time. I don’t know how it looked on the page, but felt a few breaths worth of a pause would have helped. It was like those newscasters who run stories together. Confusing. So, that could have just been the mechanics of the book, but otherwise, I’m sorry to say that I did feel the narration took some getting used to. There are things I found annoying in the delivery of words that reminded me of theater acting where the actors must over-act due to their distance from the audience. For example, elongating a word at the end of a sentence or increasing the volume and delivering it staccato style. Don said her delivery was normal British speech, so I’m probably just too critical, but it seemed like a style of speech that should be limited to a single character, but all the characters did both of these things. Too, when the subject of whether the primary protagonist should have a child came up, my first thought was, ‘Isn’t she a bit past the average stage of young motherhood?’ But then I remembered that we’d been told she was 32, or somewhere around that age. The narrator just seemed a bit more mature than that, but may still have been the right choice as narrator, given all the other characters.

GENRE:
Fiction; Mystery; Crime; Action; Thriller; Espionage; British Literature; Suspense

TIME FRAME:
Current (Early 2000’s)

LOCATION:
Oxford and a Scottish Isle

SUBJECTS:
Military experiments; Military cover-ups; Dysfunctional marriage; Private investigation

DEDICATION:
“To my mother, and in memory of my father”

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
Excerpt From “Chapter One: BHS”
“On discovering a fire, the instructions began, shout Fire and try to put it out. It was useful, heart-of-the-matter advice, and could be extended almost indefinitely in any direction. On discovering your husband’s guests are arseholes, shout Arseholes and try to put them out. This was a good starting point. Sarah was one glass of wine away from putting it in motion.
But the instructions had been pinned to the wall in her office when she’d had a job, and did not apply in the kitchen. Here, Mark would expect that all emergencies be met with predetermined orderliness – crises management was his Latest Big Thing-and graded instantly by size, type and career-damaging potential: earthquake, conflagration, shortage of pasta. His guests would not figure on the chart, since they came under Acts of God, and were to be borne as such. Of course they’re arseholes, Sare, he’d say, when they were gone and he could afford to be ironic. He’s rich and she’s dumb: what did you expect, they’d be nice? But if Sarah asked when rich got important, he’d lose a little of the irony. Since rich got on my client list, he’d say. Since rich started buying lunch. Self-promotion was his other Latest Big Thing. He had these in pairs now, so as to be sure of not missing anything.
And now he came to the kitchen, to make sure she’d missed nothing either. ‘Coffee done?’
‘Just about.’
‘Anything I can do?’
‘You can try asking that first in future.’
‘In future? You think I want to go through this again?’
She banged a cupboard, just quietly enough to sound accidental next door, but loudly enough to leave Mark in no doubt.
‘I mean,’ he went on – hissing -- Wigwam? Rufus?’
‘You said,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘another couple. You wanted company.’
‘I wanted Stephen and Rebecca.’
‘Busy.’
‘Or Tom and Annie. Or –’
‘Busy.’ She took a breath. From the living room came that awful dead sound you probably got on battlefields before the buzzards swooped. ‘And you said, when I said it was awful short notice, you said just get anybody. Anybody who could make it.’

RATING:.
3

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
9-18-2023 to 9-28-2023 ( )

Quality story telling I have come to expect from this excellent Author.
This is the start of a new series featuring Zoe Boehm, though with eighty percent of the story read the main mystery concerned our heroine, who up to this point featured in less than a page of the book, but made up for it in the rest. Clever descriptive intelligent with plenty of surprises along the way. Witty and at times laugh out loud funny, beautifully drawn characters engaging page turner at times riveting and unputdownable mystery.
Completely recommended. ( )

I'm a great fan of the author's Slough House series, which I've read and will probably reread the first few now that I know the characters - it's that good. My favorite character in that series is Jackson Lamb, a thoroughly unlikable hero who insults people all the time with comments like "Are you still here?"

So, I was happy to come across a similar character in this book, although even less likeable than Jackson Lamb. His name was "C". He seemed to be in charge of a spook department that cleaned up after operations that needed to not have happened, or people that needed to be erased. As you can imagine, he had some pretty bad people working for him, people that enjoyed the job.

When he was getting a status update from an underling, we are treated to this exchange:

‘Fuck off. Now, what happened to Mr Trafford? He been secured?’

‘I think so.’

‘How excellent. If I were interested in what you think, Howard, I’d be saving up for your memoirs. Has he been secured or not?’

Or, after summarizing a botched-up job that was particularly messy, he says:

'Did I miss anything important?’

Howard shook his head.

‘Good. Now, here’s the really interesting question. If only one part of that was to appear in the papers, which part would you like it to be?’

‘The bit about Downey killing Axel,’ Howard said.

C closed his eyes briefy. ‘Have you any idea how fucking rhetorical that was?’

This time, Howard didn’t reply.

If you read any of the Slough House series, I'm sure you'd recognize that style immediately.

The story itself was a bit darker than Slough House, perhaps. I believe it was written before Slough House. But it was a good story, with good characters, and some unlikely heroes, who happened to be women. My only complaint was that it was too short. I felt there was more that I wanted to know, but it didn't really leave any loose ends, but it could have wrapped things up a little more.

I'm hoping the rest of the series is as good or better than this one. I plan to find out soon. ( )

Love Herron's books. This one not as snide as the "Dead Lions" series, but just as twisty. Will definately read the rest of the series. He's great at characters who are fully rounded, and clever dialogue and plotting. ( )

Mick Herron’s 1st novel is a really good, bordering on great one, with a plot that sucks you in but bogs down a bit toward the end. The writing is excellent, the dialogue solid (though a bit too glib in some highly pressurized situations), and the characters top notch, once their actual roles in the proceedings are exposed.

The plot is complicated: a house in a middle class London neighborhood explodes, killing the female owner and a male visitor. A young child survives. A female neighbor with no real connection to the folks in the exploded house takes an interest in the welfare of the surviving child, only to discover she’s disappeared. Soon, we learn that it wasn’t a gas leak that led to the house’s demise, but something way more sinister.

Some shadowy Brit intelligence guys, jerk bankers, and a mild mannered private dick are thrown in the mix, and the results aren’t pretty. What began as a seemingly solvable missing kid case, which I only took on due to my previous experience with other Herron’s novels, morphed into more of a spy novel with lots of memorable characters and a fairly satisfying conclusion. Loved the writing and characters, the pace was a bit slow at times, but overall it’s a great read. ( )