Dreading the end of Slow Horses? Mick Herron’s new mystery is here to take over

As the final episode looms, Apple TV+ offers instant consolation with Down Cemetery Road, an adaptation of the spy novelist’s debut novel starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson.

Emma Thompson in Down Cemetery Road, premiering October 29 on Apple TV+.

If you’ve been wracked with dread at the thought of Slow Horses ending this week, there’s a small mercy on the horizon.

Fans of Mick Herron will have a brand-new mystery to get stuck into with Down Cemetery Road, an adaptation of the author’s 2003 debut novel. Ruth Wilson stars as Sarah Tucker, an art restorer mercifully rescued from a particularly heinous dinner party for her (increasingly estranged) husband’s haughty client when an explosion rocks her tranquil Oxford street.

A mother dies in the blast; her young daughter survives.

When Sarah visits the child in hospital with a get-well card, she finds she’s vanished. Alarmed, she hires a private detective to track her down. Enter Zoe Boehm, played by Emma Thompson, channelling Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox in a battered leather coat and clomping black boots. The two women are drawn into a government conspiracy they’re absolutely not qualified for. Herron’s plotting is as sinuous as ever, but it’s his dry, cynical dialogue that makes his worlds so moreish.

The series, created and written by Slow Horses’ Morwenna Banks, has that same intoxicating mix of intelligence and acid humour that’s made Herron’s universe the sharpest corner of television.

The first two episodes drop on Apple TV+ this week, with the remaining six released weekly.

Thompson and Ruth Wilson in Down Cemetery Road.

But let’s not let Herron hog all the glory. Streaming for free on SBS On Demand (and airing on Thursdays at 9:30pm) is Blue Lights – the best cop show this side of Happy Valley, now in its third season and better than ever. If you’ve not yet made its acquaintance, the word-of-mouth hit – which nabbed last year’s Best Drama BAFTA – follows rookie response officers in a Belfast police station. What sets Blue Lights apart from the usual procedural fare is Belfast itself: a city still shadowed by the Troubles. The old republican and loyalist factions have mutated into drug gangs, and “the peelers” still check under their cars for bombs before heading to work. It’s properly tense television, but also full of small, brilliant human beats: Stevie (Martin McCann) turning up with elaborate homemade cakes; Grace (Sian Brooke), the ex–social worker whose empathy could get her killed; Tommy (Nathan Braniff) with his encyclopedic knowledge of niche country music facts. It’s about people trying to stay good in a city increasingly indifferent to the concept.

Sian Brooke and Martin McCann in Blue Lights.

And if you’re in a film mood, Netflix last week dropped A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature in eight years. The Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty is back in her favourite territory – war – this time turning her lens on a potential nuclear strike. If two hours contemplating total annihilation doesn’t sound like your idea of escapism, fair enough. But if you’re craving a political thriller that’ll have you chewing your nails down to the quick, this is it.

Down Cemetery Road, Apple TV