Down Cemetery Road, Apple TV review - wit, grit and a twisty plot, plus Emma Thompson on top form

Back in 2003, when Mick Herron was a humble sub-editor, his debut novel was published, the first of what became a four-volume series, the Zoë Boehm thrillers. Inevitably, after the success of his later Slow Horses series, television has snaffled this character up too. Morwenna Banks works on both series as a writer-producer. And it shows.

Part of the fun of Down Cemetery Road is that it’s almost a distaff version of Slow Horses, with an atmospheric theme song with pertinent lyrics over the credits, Michelle Gurevich’s “Woman’s Touch”, great dialogue and a top-flight cast who know how to make it land. In place of the crapulous Jackson Lamb, we have an equally acerbic woman, smart and quick-thinking and unexpectedly brave. She’s not the slob Jackson is, but she has the same disdain for authority and playing by the rules. She is also magnificently funny, a characteristic that suits Emma Thompson down to the ground. 

Thompson here follows up her brilliant cameo as a gynaecologist in the latest Bridget Jones film with another tough woman with a turbocharged brain, and mouth. Almost unrecognisable at first under a spiky silver-grey ‘do, she powers into the proceedings, dragging her wiry intellectual husband, Joe  (Adam Godley), in her wake. They are a private eye team known as Oxford Investigations. Business is bad, and they don’t even have the money to feed the cat (another brilliant cameo). So when Sarah (Ruth Wilson) almost falls through their door, pushed there by a posh undergrad, Joe takes on the job she is offering.

Setting up this encounter is a breathtaking opener that takes us from Sarah at work as a restorer of old master paintings (pictured right) -her eyes, seen through her special headset, magnified several times over, as befits a woman who is quick to notice things – to her hurried dinner preparations at home with husband Mark (Tom Riley). He's a man on the make who is entertaining a prospective business partner, Inchon (Tom Goodman-Hill at his most unpleasantly serpentine). 

Inchon is the kind of man who wipes his hand on his trousers after using it to shake hands with a Black guest, a gesture duly noted by Sarah. She begins to bristle at his sneering remarks, such as his argument for regarding adoption as a "business opportunity". As he lights up an expensive cigar, the result is explosive – an extraordinary sequence in which bodies leave the ground and glass fragments seem to fly across the screen. 

Sarah’s little creative community has been torn apart, and a child has been taken to hospital. Her neighbours Denise and Rufus (Sinead Matthews and Ken Nwosu), friends of the afflicted family, are distraught. Meanwhile, in a grand room in an official building somewhere unspecified, a tall suited man (Darren Boyd, pictured below) known only as C is spitting out vicious putdowns at a grovelling functionary (Adeel Akhtar). This diatribe is full of what will turn out to be important plot details involving an operative C calls "Wreck It Ralph”, among other much worse names, who has botched a recent job. How these two strands mesh together will become increasingly clear, unravelled by Zoë and Sarah.

It’s a familiar Herron setup, where those in power are highly articulate upper-class bastards who gleefully tread on their underlings, the drones doing all the heavy lifting unthanked. So it’s up to the outliers in these upper circles to push back with some native cunning. The world of women is more obviously represented here than at Slough House, right from the outset. In the first scene, Sarah is asked to accommodate some large canvases down in her basement workshop, works by a painter currently threatened with being “cancelled” and hence in need of sanctuary. Sarah’s riposte is a double-whammy score for the sisterhood. The script also has fun with knowing glances at its stable mate, such as the “unlikely” scenario C conjures of civil war in Oxford, leading to nuclear weapons being aimed at crowded shopping centres – in fact, a typical Slow Horses scenario, viz. season 4, ep 1.

The main attraction is Thompson, equipped with a London accent that can deliver her gritty wit to perfection and a script larded with loads of it. Just in the minute or so when Sarah first meets Zoë, Zoe sets out her uncompromising stall after Sarah asks her if her husband is there. "Don't tell me,” comes the quickfire reply. “You've got a husband. He's got a secretary. Am I warm?” Sarah compounds the blunder with the question, “What do you do?" Zoë shoots back, indicating Joe, “Same as him, but better.” 

“Better” remains to be seen, but this is a sizeable addition to Apple’s roster. It’s a twisty tale that defies too much explanation, for fear of spoiling the fun (just two of the eight episodes are available for Apple TV+ subscribers to start with, then one will drop every Wednesday). But judging by the first two, this is going to be a welcome ride for Slow Horses fans.

• Down Cemetery Road is on Apple TV. New episodes on Wednesdays
• More TV reviews on theartsdesk