Welcome to the banal grime of Mick Herron’s brand of espionage. His Slough House novels were the basis of Apple TV+’s hit Slow Horses, and now the streamer’s inevitably circled back for a second helping with Down Cemetery Road, adapted from his earlier, Zoë Boehm series of books.
The Zoë here, played by Emma Thompson, is an Oxford-based private investigator who introduces herself with a quick, “I don’t drink prosecco, I don’t bond emotionally” (but can you guess she’s secretly hurting inside?). And, in Down Cemetery Road, she ends up on the run from the Anton Chigurh-brand of assassin, Amos (Fehinti Balogun), who doesn’t seem to have expressed an emotion since his eighth birthday and walks with glacial determination to all his destinations.
Cue one of those classic train chase sequences. Only, this is 2025, and the only way you can get characters to nervously dip in and out of private cabins like in the old, Poirot days is to bundle them all on the overnighter to Scotland. So, no wooden panels and plush furnishing here—all you get is grey plastic and the sort of overhead lights that make everyone look sick.
But Herron’s work, it seems, would rather lean into the automated blandness and confused bureaucracy of modern living than relegate the genre into the realm of delusional fantasy. Not that Down Cemetery Road is entirely without delusion here. Zoë teams up with an Ashmolean Museum art conservationist, Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson), after a nearby suburban home explodes, leaving two dead and a little girl injured, yet mysteriously squirrelled away by authorities.
Sarah doesn’t know the girl, but there’s a nervous fluttery feeling in her heart, some unresolved girlhood strife (effectively portrayed by Wilson), that compels her towards this mystery and, in turn, leads the two women to stumble across a full-blown government conspiracy. Only, here, they’re apparently living in a world where UK politicians would actually be concerned about their complicity in war crimes instead of simply arresting anybody who draws attention to them.
Still, rose-tinted view aside, there’s a playful and witty way to how Slow Horses writer Morwenna Banks, who developed this series, presents Bond-worthy escapades on a slightly more humdrum level. Meanwhile, all these characters are slowly circling around the egocentrism drain hole, whether it’s Sarah’s bohemian bestie Wigwam (Sinead Matthews), who says of motherhood, “we don’t correct spelling… it’s undermining”, or a self-pitying lecturer who claims he’s been “shamed on TikTok for reading the students a bit of Updike”.
Even Sarah is forced to question whether her desire to help this girl is rooted in genuine heroism or, as Zoë puts it, an attempt to blow up her “Farrow & Ball life” in the pursuit of something a little less nauseating. Can’t she just get really, really into true crime like everyone else?
Even if the cover-up here, when finally uncovered, won’t exactly shake your foundations, there’s always a new, withering aside waiting around the corner right when your patience starts to flag—and always delivered with borderline glee by the likes of Adeel Akhtar, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, and Darren Boyd. Thompson practically feasts on a line like, “when did you let yourself get so fucking small?”
And with television so dominated by dry Weetabix thrillers where everyone talks to each other like an information output machine, Down Cemetery Road (and, of course, Slow Horses before it) feels like a total relief. I mean, can’t we at least have a little fun with it?
