Spook Street: Slough House Thriller 4

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Given that the most recent novel came out in May 2022 and the TV series has already been renewed for a second series, it's very likely there will be more. Catherine Standish – She made her exit from Slough House, but will find it’s not as easy as she may think to walk away. She shook her head; at the cigarette, at him, at the way he broke news, which was the way he broke everything else: with a certain grim joy at watching it shatter. The prologue yanks you into a typical mall somewhere in London. It’s full of busy shoppers & bored teens lounging around the fountain. Then the unspeakable happens. A man steps into the crowd & detonates his vest. In the horrific aftermath, MI5 is called in to investigate & calm the public but things really hit the fan when the bomber is identified.

Louisa Guy was sent to Slough House after she lost a tail involved in gun smuggling. She is one of the most competent agents and appears in every book. She and Min Harper had a brief but intense affair which ended in tragic circumstances. I’m a radical feminist, as you know,” Lamb might have said, stubbing out his cigarette. “But the hot flashes always get these old girls in the end.” You do realize,” Herron told the execs slowly, “that in the book I’m writing right now I kill him off?” Lamb and by extension, River, uncover a scheme to breed the “ultimate sleeper”. And somehow the legendary OB is involved. The central conceit of the books is that MI5, like any large organisation, needs somewhere to place its most hopeless employees, and this place is Slough House, a building just around the corner from the Barbican Centre. They’re not allowed anywhere near MI5 HQ, which is referred to as Regent’s Park although the organisation is no longer based there.

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And there are changes afoot at Regents Park as well, including the introduction of Claude Whelan following the activities of Ingrid Tierney in the last books, and new head Dog, Emma Flyte.

When former spook Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope passing between hands in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he's witnessed something important. When he relays those suspicions to a man who babysits retired spies, however, he sets off a chain of life-changing events. As with all the best series, the characters here are all well developed and surprisingly, I’ve come to care for them. They are the dregs of the service, but they have their own weird charms. The element of surprise is a constant in the novel, but not for one moment is it anything other than totally convincing. Equally so is the cynical portrayal of the Intelligence Services. Whilst they are always concerned with ensuring the safety of the country, they insist on doing this in such a way that blame will never be attached to them if things go wrong. If mistakes have been made in the past they must remain in the past. In addition, there is always the desire for career advancement, which requires an innate capacity for placing blame elsewhere.Once, someone collapsed while I was giving a reading,” Herron offered. “Or, no, that happened twice.” Fainted. “Or maybe he was asleep?” No one had died, though.

In the morning, Howard headed out to go hiking in the Malvern Hills, and Herron and I boarded a train to Oxford. We sat at a laminated table, face to face, watching rain streak the windows as we sped through the sodden countryside. “See It, Say It, Sorted,” the signs above every door read, flashing green pixels. It's certainly possible to read this as a standalone but I would strongly recommend starting with Slow Horses: Slough House and following the series to understand the emotional trajectories. Sharp, cynical, violent in places, but with the snappiest of sharp dialogue and laugh-out-loud funny in places, I love what Herron is doing with this series. With this re-read Spook Street remains one of my favorite Slough House installments. Herron just nailed this perfect medley, akin to authentic Thai cuisine, in which the sweet, the sour and the heat are perfectly balanced in a complementary manner. This novel is all about relationships. It's taken a while for friendships to firm and camaraderie amongst the slow horses to bloom. And then Herron pulls the rug out from right underneath you. JK Coe – One of the sharper minds running with the slow horses. Also probably a psychopath. Win some, lose some.Before the Slough House series, he wrote the Zoë Boehm series. Each book in the series is loosely connected by the presence of PI Zoë Boehm. The books in this series are: Over at Slough House, the agents are excelling at their specialty – complicating an already difficult situation. If we’re looking for themes in the Slough House series, with this entry I would get a bit Shakespearean. It’s an idea that has been around longer than the bard but I like his phrasing. From The Merchant of Venice, act III, sc. V, l. 1 – So elderly spies had an eye kept on them, in case they become unbuttoned, and maybe there were times-- how could he not have thought about this?--when the Service reached out a gloved hand and eased an old spook's passage from this life. Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge are the odd couple, though they’re not even a couple. She was in comms at The Park before she laid out a co-worker, and also has addiction issues. He used to break down doors and carry a gun before his gambling problems compromised him.

A characteristic that Herron's Slough House books seem to share is a good deal of scene-setting. The scene is generally Slough House or a location of a Slough House occupant's screwup sometimes including the screw-up itself. In Spook Street, the scene-setting went on for so long such that I, with my aforementioned addiction, actually put the book down for a night and began another. I have never before done such a thing with a Slough House book. Slough House, Book 5.5 | The (Marylebone) Drop (Novella) The Drop, aka The Marylebone Drop in the US (2018) But it wasn’t until he began tying up some of the threads so I could see why he digressed that I got fascinated again. More action, more surprises (and yes, more banter and character development), and all-in-all, another great read in the series. To be a writer of genre fiction is to belong to something akin to an honorable medieval guild. Taylor’s newest book, “The Royal Secret,” is the latest in his series of best-selling thrillers set in seventeenth-century London. When Herron was saddled with being called spy fiction’s “best-kept secret,” Taylor wrote a review in which he said that Herron writes like Raymond Chandler, except better. Both Herron and Taylor blurbed Hilary’s spooky novel “Fragile.” Herron called it “a dark river.” Spook Street is thoroughly gripping espionage, focused on intelligent plotting over action for its own sake—think le Carré, but with a heartier dash of dry humor.”The OB and terrorist plots zip along, with Herron’s usual blend of tension, thrills and facepalm moments. Herron’s depiction of the members of the intelligence services is as entertaining as usual, even knowing that we’re all in big trouble if he’s anywhere close to being accurate about their conniving, self-serving, dishonest and bumbling ways. In 2003, Heron published his first novel, Down Cemetery Road. It was the first volume in a four-book series about Zoë Boehm, an Oxford private detective. [4] If you read one spy novel this year, read Real Tigers". Spectator.co.uk . Retrieved 18 December 2016.