Down Cemetery Road review – Emma Thompson is great in this thriller from the creator of Slow Horses | television

I We always forget how good Emma Thompson is. This is partly because she tends to work in film rather than television, and last made it to film in the mid-1990s. It’s also partly because it’s always so… How can I put this? …So Emma Thompson in all her interviews and award speeches I can’t imagine her setting herself far enough apart from adequate representation.

But of course she can – and she does as private detective Zoe Boehm, a woman of flint and diamonds, in the new eight-part thriller Down Cemetery Road, an adaptation of Morwenna Banks’s debut novel of the same name by Mick Herron. Heron has since become known for Slow Horses, the series about spies caught at Slough House pushing paper under the world-weary eyes of Jackson Lamb, hoping to get back in the game. Gary Oldman, who plays Lamb, has become a niche national treasure in his portrayal of the beleaguered hero we like to think lives in all of us. I hope the same happens with Thompson/Boim, because they’re both great. Boehm is a role model for women everywhere, but especially those hampered by a lack of innate sarcasm or people-pleasing nature (or early training). Look at Bohm and learn. Observe the barren wasteland where you stand, and the field of intercourse you have left for her to practice. “I don’t drink prosecco and I don’t get emotionally attached,” she tells a new client, and one of the joys of the show is that this remains almost entirely true.

The new client is art restorer Sarah Tucker, played by the glorious Ruth Wilson. Sarah is another woman who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, with the exception of her investment banker husband Mark (Tom Reilly). The pair are in the middle of a horrid dinner party with Mark’s potential new client, a wealthy prick named Gerard Inchon (Tom Goodman-Hill, who spends a lot of time with a character who delivers some of the best lines in a drama full of great stuff). They are joined by Sarah’s friend Wigwam (Sinead Matthews), a hippie with four kids (“Would you start a cult?” Gerard wonders), and her new partner Rufus (Ken Nwosu), when a neighbor’s house explodes, killing two adults and wounding a child.

Sarah goes to visit baby Dina in the hospital. The strange hostility of the staff, who refuse to let her see the little girl whom she later sees bundled into a car and driven away, leads to an obsession – there are hints of mental health struggles in Sarah’s past – to find her. The assignment brings Sarah into contact with Zoe’s private detective team and her hapless but devoted husband, Joe (Adam Godley). Joe starts to look into it.

Could Dinah’s disappearance have anything to do with the story unfolding elsewhere? Specifically, at the Ministry of Defence, where nervous handler Hamza Malik (Adeel Akhtar) is dragged over the coals by his boss, C (Darren Boyd, cast against type to great effect, in a terrifying part that demands all his comedic chops, since he has almost as many great lines as Gerard). It was not a gas leak that destroyed the house, but a bomb planted by a rogue agent on the border whom C variously referred to as “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Twisted Firestarter.” He needs to be brought back under control and covered up for the consequences of his mistakes, along with the mistake he was apparently trying to cover up for others. We all look at the shaken Malik. No one has high hopes.

Down Cemetery Road is great stuff. There is not a wasted moment, not a wasted word. Everything is there for a reason (especially Fehinti Balogun as Amos, the bridge between Malik and his crazy or bad client who is definitely dangerous to know, and Nathan Stewart-Garrett as the man captured by Mark’s camera phone dangling around the site of the explosion). The plot thickens at a fast pace and the twists are worth the wait. It smoothes out some of the book’s technical problems and failings nicely – for example, bringing Zoë to the fore early on – and retains all the dry humor and poignancy that Slow Horses fans were surely hoping for. I know there’s a side issue, but for those of us who can barely look at Jackson Lamb due to the thin layer of filth coating him, it’s an important one – Zoe looks like she’s completely mastered the basics of hygiene and laundry. Who could ask for more?