Down Cemetery Road is sold as the first Zoë Boehm book and Zoë Boehm is barely in it. The lead is a woman called Sarah Tucker. Zoë turns up partway through, working out of Oxford Investigations with her husband Joe Silvermann, and stays at the edge of things. The second book is hers. That catches people out.
There are four. Down Cemetery Road 2003, The Last Voice You Hear 2004, Why We Die 2006, Smoke and Whispers 2009. Read them in that order. The fourth does not work if you have not read the other three.
All four came out before Slow Horses, which was 2010. The Crime Writers' Association says Herron 'began writing fiction while working as a sub editor in London', and that is the period this is. He did not win the Goldsboro Gold Dagger until 2013, for Dead Lions, three years after the last Boehm book. Most people came to these backwards, off the back of Slough House.
Ranked, then.
1. Why We Die
2006. A jewellery shop in Oxford is robbed and Zoë is hired to find the men who did it. Running alongside that, a widower called Tim Whitby who has decided to kill himself checks into a hotel, meets a woman called Katrina Blake, and does not.
2. The Last Voice You Hear
2004. Zoë on her own, running what is left of the agency. A woman called Caroline Daniels dies under a train. The boyfriend nobody has ever met does not come to the funeral, so Zoë goes looking for him, and then a teenager dies the same sort of way.
3. Down Cemetery Road
2003. Sarah Tucker is at a dinner party in Oxford when a house down the road blows up. A four-year-old girl, Dinah Singleton, comes out of the wreckage and then goes missing. Sarah starts asking where she went. Nobody wants her to.
4. Smoke and Whispers
2009. Newcastle. A body comes out of the Tyne with Zoë's identification on it. Somebody has to be fourth.
Apple filmed the first one. Eight episodes, out worldwide on Wednesday 29 October 2025, two to start and then one a week until 10 December. Emma Thompson plays Zoë. Ruth Wilson plays Sarah, who the series renames Sarah Trafford. So the adaptation puts Zoë on the poster of the book she is least in, which is one way of fixing the thing I opened with. Their announcement calls him a 'CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning author'. That is the award for the whole career rather than for one book.
The Slough House nine are a separate job and I have done those in another post.
