Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

Sarah Trafford is bored and frustrated after losing her publishing job, and is especially annoyed when her husband, Mark, forces her to host a dinner party for a pretentious financier, Gerard, and his trophy wife. Gerard enjoys goading Sarah and he is even ruder to the other guests; an interruption by an explosion in the neighborhood is welcome and they all go outside to see what happened.

. . . there was a dull thump following by a sliding noise, as if a geological event were taking place at an unexpected venue. Wigwam dropped her empty wineglass; the Trophy Wife’s eyes grew round in alarm. Mark rose to his feet, looking automatically to Gerard for enlightenment, as if having more money than anyone else made Gerard the expert on everything. To her fury Sarah found she had done the same herself. Gerard put his glass down very carefully and turned to look at the curtained window, then nodded to himself, as if an earlier suspicion had been confirmed, and turned back to Sarah. “That was a bomb,” he said.

Sarah joins a group of onlookers the next day at the bombed location, where a house used to be, and learns only Dinah, the four-year-old daughter, survived. Although she is not maternal and didn’t know the child, she becomes obsessed with Dinah’s wellbeing and starts making inquiries about her – at the hospital, at the police station, and even hires a private detective, Joe Silvermann, without telling her husband. Joe is quite a character but like everyone else, finds her interest in an unknown child quite odd and tries to discourage her, but does start asking questions and finds out the explosion was not an accident. The policeman who told him this warns Joe to forget they ever spoke. Joe tries to tell Sarah to drop it but she simply can’t, even when she realizes she is in danger and is forced to go on the run. Then everything becomes even more unpredictable and exciting . . . .

Down Cemetery Road was Mick Herron’s debut novel and he is now better known for his Slough House books about a group of demoted MI5 agents. This is a different series, and it started slowly with Sarah’s discontent with her boring life in Oxford but picked up when she hired Joe to help her investigation. The reader is drawn in by all the different threads – which are all carefully set up by the author, who is unsentimental about killing his characters, when necessary. The subtle humor, snappy dialogue, and escalating secrets are an appealing combination. Sarah’s obsession with Dinah is a little hard to understand (I mean, the rest of us would love to live in Oxford with nothing to do but occasional dinner parties) but she is a likable, if neurotic, character and I wanted her to survive and outsmart her enemies. I enjoyed this while driving (but now I take the bus and subway to work so it takes longer to listen to a book), hated getting out of the car at suspenseful moments, and impatiently waited for the sequel to arrive at my library.

This is my fourth book of the year for the Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.  Kind of funny to have two books in a row set in Oxford!

Title: Down Cemetery Road
Author: Mick Herron
Narrator: Alix Dunmore
Publication: Recorded Books, originally published in 2003
Genre: Mystery
Source: Library