Spook Street: Slough House Thriller 4

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This novel is a series highlight for me, and went on to win the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award as well as being shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award, The British Book Awards and The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. One scene in particular where a spy is followed by another who, in turn, is followed by two more is very cleverly written. The title refers to a suspicious state of mind: “When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret. She has corn-silk-yellow hair, pale, delicate features, and, faintly, freckles, and she drives, I decided, not like a taxi-driver but like a cop on a cop show circa 1972.

But River, himself an agent at Slough House, MI5’s outpost for disgraced spies, has other things to worry about. In Ledbury, a half-timbered medieval market town in Herefordshire, Herron and Howard and I checked into the Feathers Hotel, built around 1565 on the post route from Cheltenham to Aberystwyth. Reading Herron, or listening to him, is like riding on a carrousel and switching animals every time it goes around.The author’s idiosyncratic writing is unique in his genre: the spycraft of le Carré refracted through the blackly comic vision of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. A Russian oligarch is visiting London and elements of The Park want to turn him because a potential future Russian president who owes British Intelligence would be a massive coupe. Jackson Lamb was much the same, the difference being he used a shot glass rather than a teacup and didn’t wake when it fell. It's not often a reviewer can say, "You've never read anything quite like this" but it's a safe encomium to use in the case of Mick Herron. But Herron, as he himself might put it, has never been to joe country and lives nowhere near Spook Street.

The first series follows the action of book one, and it stars British acting greats Gary Oldman (as Jackson Lamb) and Kristin Scott Thomas (as Diana Taverner). i read the first 2 books then saw the series then dove back in…seeing it enhances if have already read some of the books- how you imagine the environment will change once you see it and LAMB, but no matter. Lamb is an old joe who’s straight out of Dickens, if Dickens had ever invented a character who used the word “twat” all the time. There is a sense of real danger from the beginning that leaves the reader in no doubt that none of these characters – many of whom have shared page space for three books so far – are safe, that no-one is guaranteed to survive until the end, and that a happy ending is far from likely. You do realize,” Herron told the execs slowly, “that in the book I’m writing right now I kill him off?Which wouldn’t be entirely surprising; as Jackson Lamb points out, “Spooks love their stories: it’s why they’re spooks. Spook Street is a superb novel - fast-paced, original, witty and completely satisfying on every level. He was raised by his grandfather, David, a service legend, and grew up hearing stories of his time in the service. Lamb’s having an empty whisky glass in his hand when there is a full bottle on the table is ‘presumably a temporary anomaly’.

Herron is spy fiction’s great humorist, mixing absurd situations with sparklingly funny dialogue and elegant, witty prose. A private funding deal, worked out in secret between Diana Taverner and Peter Judd, gives the Park the resources to strike back at Putin, sending a hit team into Russia to rub out the Novichok poisoners. Herron won the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger for this novel, though for my money his debut is a better book. Now suffering the onset of dementia, the “Old Bastard”, as he is affectionately known by his grandson, River, may be in danger of revealing secrets that he has kept for over twenty years.it’s a real pleasure to watch the super-smart if damaged Slough House agents rising to the occasion. As of December2022 [update], the series includes eight novels, plus several associated novellas, and events in related novels. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.