Next from Mick Herron, THE SECRET HOURS, in September

I generally review books pretty close to the publication date -- so if the review intrigues you, you'll be able to get the book soon afterward. As a result, I won't post a full review of THE SECRET HOURS  until later this summer.

But not only are there exceptions to waiting for the right moment. There are reasons for exceptions to self-imposed rules like this one. 

Mick Herron's new book, THE SECRET HOURS, will be released in September. Layered, rich, flavored with political insight, wry humor, espionage of course, and above all, love and loyalty, it's being promoted as a stand-alone spy thriller.

However, this book unfolds many of the secrets that have been lurking in Herron's Slough House series. And it's going to resonate more deeply for you if you've already devoured and at least partly remember what happens to which characters in the series.

So this is your book alert: Buy Mick Herron's series now, or borrow it, or dust off your own copies and spend the summer refreshing your attention to the quirkiest, bravest, most ordinary, most-difficult-to-share-an-office-with spies of Herron's disastrous failure side of MI5. 

You will thus guarantee yourself an astonishingly good time in September.

Which in turn causes me to suggest: Get your spouse and/or best friend reading these, too. Then you'll have the ultimate pleasure of sharing a fantastic book with the person you most like. Couldn't get much better than that.

Oh yes, the books you are about to buy, borrow, or dust off (lucky you!) are:

1. Slow Horses (2010)
2. Deal Lions (2013)
3. Real Tigers (2016)
4. Spook Street (2017)
5. London Rules (2018)
6. Joe Country (2019)
7. Slough House (2021) 
8. Bad Actors (2022) 

And you can see a lot of them reviewed on this site by clicking here. 

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

BAD ACTORS, Sardonic and Delightful Espionage from Mick Herron

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

 “Herron’s plot is packed with twists and delightfully sardonic conversations, and the book’s only major flaw is that at some point it ends, and one must resume normal life.”

It’s hard to miss the promotion on television and online for “Slow Horses,” as the earliest in Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels jumps genre into an Apple TV+ show featuring Gary Oldman. But Bad Actors, eighth in the series, has no connection to performance, despite the title that might immediately pop a stage into the back of an American reader’s mind.

It turns out that the British term “bad actor” means a person who’s done things that are harmful, illegal, or immoral. Herron’s Slough House is a discard group for MI5 spies who’ve messed up and now get tedious assignments sorting through social media or phone books or worse. Every spy assigned there—dustbinned might be a good term to add—knows they’ve made a mess somewhere in their recent past, and they won’t be allowed back into the Park, the office of really performing agents, ever again.

Well, unless you count Ashley Khan. Quite young and still deluding herself that the infamous Diana Taverner will take her back into important operations, Ashley is also obsessed with the source of her demotion: Jackson Lamb, head of Slough House. On a recent assignment, Lamb caught her following one of his spies. They may be (they are) all failures, but still, they are his, and he doesn’t allow anyone to mess with them (much). So he’d broken Ashley’s arm and sent her back to Taverner, whose acid response was, “You broke her, you own her.” Back to Slough House she went.

Since Ashley is as paranoid as any other spy, and clueless as well, she’s baffled by the interactions around her in Slough House. While she obsesses on punishing Lamb, the team is actually in crisis mode. Cokehead Shirley Dander’s been send to a sanitarium to dry out; narcissist Roddy Ho is creating avatar girlfriends for himself as a distraction; River Cartwright, the most potentially sane of the Slough House discards, isn’t even around, presumed dead or permanently missing.

And like Ashley, most readers will rush a third of the way into the book, at least, before confirming that almost all the machinations taking place have Jackson Lamb behind them. One could certainly be excused for not looking at Lamb—between his predictably terrible farts, his smoking and spitting, and his disgustingly soiled clothing and office, he’s both camouflaged and repellent. But he’s also brilliant, and much sharper, it turns out, than Diana Taverner herself.

Thanks to adept storytelling, readers are aware before Lamb (or is that impossible?) that ex-spy Claude Whelan, a tool in use by Taverner, is muddying all possible waters with a notion of payback on Lamb, and he’s more effective than young Ashley:

Where did Whelan’s loyalties lie? Not with either side. Not with any bad actor, whether in the Service he’s led or the government he’d served. … It still rankled, his fall from grace, and why shouldn’t he take some matter of revenge? It wasn’t really him, he knew that. He was nobody’s idea of an avenging knight. But wasn’t it time for a change.

Soon dominoes are tumbling in various directions, only Lamb really knows their triggers, and as a savior of anyone or anything, Lamb’s even less likely than Claude Whelan. The fun (and poignant bonding) of Bad Actors lies in watching all the others, at Slough House and beyond, gradually realize that only Lamb’s irreverent demands and plans are likely to get them out of a mess that’s so absurd, so wracked with capers and collapses, then even Claude Whelan will say he can’t tear his eyes away.

Herron’s plot is packed with twists and delightfully sardonic conversations, and the book’s only major flaw is that at some point it ends, and one must resume normal life. But there may be a flavor of wicked humor remaining in what one does afterward—along with great satisfaction at what Lamb and the “Slow Horses” pull out of their grubby, out-of-fashion hats.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Do You Like Your Espionage Icy or Warm? Check out JOE COUNTRY by Mick Herron

Mick Herron's Slough House espionage novels come along mostly as an annual series now, with occasional diversions into standalone works and novellas and such. JOE COUNTRY is the sixth full-length novel in the set that opened with Slough Horses, where the ever-farting and outwardly vulgar Jackson Lamb corrals the failures of Britain's government-run system: the men and women who've committed mistakes so glaring or costly (or stupid) that they can't be allowed back in the saddle, yet can't be simply fired either, since they know too darned much. Hence Lamb verbally abuses and embarrasses them while giving them small tasks to keep them out of trouble.

But readers of the series know that some of what's put the "slough horses" into this corral has been bad luck or someone else's successful venial plot. Or love. Or grief. So from time to time, Jackson Lamb sends his crew out to actually accomplish something in "joe country": the landscape of where the working spy, aka the "joe," struggles to undermine the forces of evil and somehow stay alive.

In John Le Carré's classic espionage series, George Smiley's drive is not really love or protectiveness, but an ardent belief in honor that can only be justified if he can make the scales around him come into balance. To do that, he has to pay attention to and care about the small people being run over by the government and espionage ("church and spy") maneuvers and sacrifice plays.

Herron gives a very different set of characters, only one of whom might fit into Smiley's honorable world: River Cartwright, grandson and espionage heir of the O.B. (Old Bast***). But as JOE COUNTRY gets underway, River's grandfather is dying, not going to outlast the day.

He had thought about calling his mother, but for no longer than it took to shake his head. Then he'd willed himself up and into yesterday's clothes, arriving at Skylarks, the nursing home, before the sun. His grandfather had been moved into a room that was purpose-built to die in, though nobody actually said so. The lighting was gentle, and the view through the window of winter hills, their treeline a skeleton chorus. The bed the O.B. would never leave was a clinical, robust device, with upright panels to prevent him from rolling off, and various machines monitoring his progress. On one, his pulse echoed, a signal tapping out from a wavering source. A last border crossing, thought River. His grandfather was entering joe country.

River's deep solitude of the soul, and his bitter state of mourning, were in place long before his grandfather began to fail. But they're not a symbol for the state of England (or Britain); they're an honest assessment of his world and his provoked failures in it, as well as the violence of joe country itself. Each of the others who accompany River in Lamb's entourage is broken in some way, some of the ways more entertaining than others—it can be a hoot to see Roderick Ho lasciviously spy on random women and think he's a hot ticket, while it's desperately sad to walk with Catherine Standish as she flirts with destroying herself alcoholically ... only holding back in order to either punish or rescue Lamb (pick any two).

Meanwhile, the Park—that is, the formally surviving manor of espionage where the pay and the politics both serve as honed blades—aims to destroy Lamb and his entourage. Fortunately, Lamb's not just tricky and malicious (and much smarter than his opponents): He's discovered a dangerous foreign agent manipulating the top brass and knows how to use that to ensure protection for his game.

It's Catherine Standish, despite her vulnerability, who takes in the whole scope of the mess at last. "She had to remind herself, maybe for the millionth time, that this was the world she lived in; that Spook Street wasn't all boring reports in manila folders. That joe country lay around the corner."

The twists and wicked humor in JOE COUNTRY, combined with the odd forms of loyalty embedded in the operations underway, make it a classic. Shelve it. Mark for re-reading. (I have.)

Do you need to read the others in the series first? I always want to say no, but ... tell you what, pick any of the preceding titles (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules) and read that one first. Then JOE COUNTRY will feel twice as satisfying.

But no matter which route you take, when you finish this book, make room for the other Mick Herron titles on the same shelf. They deserve the space, including in the heart.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Recovering from James Bond? Try REAL TIGERS, Mick Herron

Espionage fiction creates a painful double bind: We want it to be thrilling, and we want it to reveal something about the real thing. It's possible, of course, to just jump into those books that take place on nuclear submarines facing off against Russian ones -- or whoever is the enemy of the moment -- and race along with the ticking clock and the hidden bombs. But the books that endure in this genre tend toward the mournful, the regretful, the slow if intense revelation of betrayal and loss. And maybe that's the effect of deep fiction, or maybe it's part of a Truth: You can't play with global power and not get burned.

John Le Carré walked this route through the Cold War's links with Britain's diminishing standing, walking George Smiley into the morass of well-loved men-who-have-bonded-as-spies and edgy women (from Lady Anne to Connie Sachs). Alan Furst's books make me afraid to visit Eastern Europe, since I worry that I'd sob from one town to the next. Charles McCarry binds the sweet tragedy of aging to the complications of loyalties. And Olen Steinauer proves that even a spy of integrity and unexpected courage is still going to get crushed by the Great Powers.

So why not start all over again with Mick Herron's marvelous "Slough House" trilogy, where the premise is unflinchingly grim from the start: Slough (pronounced "slow") House is a division of Britain's famous MI5 that holds the operatives who've made a mistake so severe that official forgiveness is impossible -- but it's better to shove them into a make-work, useless department than to try to fire them. Let them push paper and do Internet searches and drink their way into oblivion. And maybe, some day, quit on their own and lose their pensions.

With REAL TIGERS, the third in this series (the others were Slow Horses  and Dead Lions -- notice a trend?), Herron pries open the collected lives of his not very merry gang of disastrous espionage failures, from River Cartwright (victim of a misplaced traffic jam of sorts) to Jackson Lamb (too smart to be trusted) to the desperately horny but very tech-savvy Roderick Ho. And Catherine Standish, whose past alcoholic idiocies have added up to repeated failures that locked her into Jackson Lamb's limping team of misfits.

Shockingly, Catherine finds herself kidnapped from the London streets. It seems pointless -- any information value she might have once had is long since gone -- and it's messy, since she knows one of her assailants, another former drunk named Sean. Catherine's sobriety isn't pretty or brave; nor is her reaction to being "taken" in a van, then photographed in bonds and a gag. And the question she's issued is disturbing: "Which of your colleagues would you trust with your life?"

Catherine is disturbed, perturbed, not particularly frightened, and curious about her own chances of survival:

When Jackson Lamb was send into exile in the reshuffle that followed, he'd taken her with him. And it was true, she knew, that Lamb would never leave a joe in the lurch -- having been one himself; having been left there himself, more than likely. So maybe she should have nominated Lamb as the colleague she'd trust with her life, except that there wasn't much she'd trust him with. The collateral damage didn't bear thinking about.

What's actually going on? Those who've followed the series will catch the scent of sickening wicked betrayal in the air when Dame Ingrid, who ought to protect Slough House, strides into the action. (You can read this one "cold" without the other two books, even though it will be much more fun if you take them series in order. Fear not, we are talking espionage disaster here -- so go right ahead and read this one first, then ramble through the other two. Each one's a gem.) And although River Cartwright is the un-spy who races toward Catherine's rescue (the wrong way, of course), in the long run the heavy lifting comes down to Jackson Lamb himself: his plans, his negotiations, and his deft playing of each of his team members, with lust, addictions, failures, and all, within the political crisis they've all tumbled into. Prime Minister? Even higher and wider? Catastrophes begin to unfurl.

Herron's "imagining the whole thing" doesn't detract for a minute from the conviction that in a lot of departments of every government's espionage apparatus, the fallible flawed people create many of the issues, just as they do at Slough House. And as the plot shifts to a much wider field of betrayal and likely deaths, it also becomes utterly convincing.

But what is the stake, for the "whackjob files" being maneuvered, and Catherine's freedom? And will the "slow horses" of Jackson Lamb's pained little office commit their usual massive errors all over again? Or will loyalty -- and a clever sense of how to leverage pressure back to its origins -- preserve Slough House to fight another day?

Now that I've mentioned so many details of this third book, I think I might have to go back and read the entire series again. Let George Smiley wander off in his ever-damp raincoat. Next time I'm in London, it's Catherine Standish I'll be looking for.

Oh, Herron's website is rather a mess. But poking around on it will reveal items like this description of how he starts his next book in this series: "It’s like rocking up to a college reunion, with everyone behaving themselves at first, but loosening up after a few drinks. I wonder when the fighting will break out?" 

A tip of the hat to Mick Herron for an unforgettable group of characters. And to Soho Crime, printing the edgy, the strange, the powerful, and the global, in today's essential crime fiction.