“When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker—a young married woman, an art conservationist, who is bored and unhappy with domestic life—becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. What begins in a peaceful neighborhood reaches its climax on a remote, unwelcoming Scottish island as the search puts Sarah in league with a man who finds himself being hunted down by murderous official forces.”
This Herron debut novel and works most of the way. It’s still standout piece of Robert Ludlum style thriller, but the book sort of comes to a grinding halt in towards the end of the second act before picking up again in the last quarter. So it’s not as good as his Slough House series, so it’s more of promise of what will come in later years. Still, it’s filled with Herron’s snarky, black humor, and a lot of people die, including some people that appeared important to the the narrative (though the identity of one killer was a surprise to me).
This was the first in four novels in the Oxford Investigation series featuring Zoe Boehm –who really is a secondary character here. I wondered often while reading if Herron did not know how to end the book properly –the many meandering thoughts and too much sidetracking helped me feed into this thought- and went back a gave her a reason to suddenly pop up in the last half of the book. I liked Sarah, but I found some of her actions a bit unbelievable. But that’s what these novels do best.
Not sure I’ll read any more of Herron's Oxford Investigations books (never say never), but there still at three more standalone thrillers I may partake.
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