Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron

He wondered sometimes how he would end, and whether it would be anywhere like this:  in the ashtray of the city, surrounded by thieves and no-hopers.
--Mick Herron, Down Cemetery Road (Constable, 2003)

It is a pleasure to discover a "new" writer, especially one who has fifteen novels in print.  Down Cemetery Road was Mick Herron's first book and he writes with intense concentration on the intricacies of the plot as well as the details of the vivid characters, much of their thinking conveyed by interior monologues.  Sarah Tucker is a bored housewife in a suburb of Oxford who does not believe the official story of why a neighbor's house blew up and what happened to the four-year-old whose parents died.  Her investigation leads her to a private detective who ends up dead and she has to flee to Scotland in search of the missing child.  Even the characters who appear briefly have complicated histories and personalities and often we only find things out when Sarah herself does.  Herron's beautifully written leisurely descriptions of Oxford and its environs are punctuated with moments of startling violence, much of it not directly shown and all the more powerful for that.