By Mick Herron

From the author of the Slow Horses series… his earlier series Zoë Boehm & Joe Silvermann are the PIs for the series. I have read some of their short stories in collections with the Slow Horses. In this story, Sarah lives in Oxford and during a bad dinner party one night an explosion rocks the neighborhood. At the dinner party is her husband, the rich client he wooing, his client’s trophy wife, and Sarah’s hippieish best friend, and her new slacker husband. But why did the house down the street explode? Is everyone who they seem to be? What’s in Sarah’s past? And what happened to the injured daughter from the house?

Sarah retains Joe to find the little girl. And from there things become more complicated than she could ever imagine. Is the government involved?

This is a slow burn book, that takes a while to get going. Sarah is a former addict that doesn’t always make the best decisions. Joe is a dreamer, and seems to have learned everything he knows from hard boiled detective novels and classic film noir. The alternative title for the series is the Zoë Boehm mysteries…and while she is introduced towards the beginning…its not till the last quarter of the book that she appears and the story then really takes off. That last quarter and Herron’s writing (this is his first published novel) held my attention to the end.

317 Pages

3.5/5