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.

Former MI5 Director Stella Rimington's New Espionage Novel, THE MOSCOW SLEEPERS

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

What if ordinary universities in America are already hosting “sleeper” agents and networks, awaiting a signal from Moscow or Beijing to activate and demolish democracy? All too possible, this concern leaps to life in the newest book from former MI5 director Stella Rimington, The Moscow Sleepers. Grimly real (as American elections already show), the threat of international meddling confronts all democracies that depend on freedom of speech and universal voting.

As The Moscow Sleepers opens, a professor’s murder in a Vermont hospital provides the first clue that such a plan could be in place. Around the same time, a postcard message alerts Liz Carlyle, working at a high level within MI5—Britain’s Security Service, addressing threats inside the UK—that a former collaborator in Moscow wants a face-to-face meeting in Berlin. MI5 would have to alert its international-operations counterpart, MI6, for this kind of outreach. Will Liz be able to control the connection safely if she complicates it in this way?

Rimington provides straightforward espionage activity, without much distraction of character issues. (Liz is lonely, and responds differently in some situations as a result, but not in any way that could jeopardize the action.) In a delightful way, she reveals Liz Carlyle’s alliance with the junior MI5-er whom Liz has mentored, Peggy Kinsolving, and the utility of that alliance in navigating a male-heavy hierarchy. “Lean in” is looking good for these women at headquarters, as well as in the field.

And the field is where Liz will have to go, to respond to outreach from that Moscow field agent. Of course, MI6 will send its own agent, the deft and adept Bruno Mackay, but it’s Liz and Peggy who will find the threads that tie together the murder in Vermont, the agitated spy reaching out, and an odd and sinister boarding school in the English countryside where tech-brained immigrants are led unwittingly to become expert hackers.

To grasp the import of that last strand, Liz reconnects with Chief Constable Richard Pearson:

 'I’d better warn you it’s business,’ said Liz, and she heard Pearson sigh. ‘Well, only partly,’ she added. ‘Something’s come up in an investigation that seems to connect to a college in your patch. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it. It’s a sixth-form college about ten miles west of Southwold called Bartholomew Manor.’

There was a pause, then Pearson said, ‘Now, that is really interesting. I don’t think it can be a coincidence. This college has crossed our radar here, and just a few days ago. I’d love to know what your interest in it is—if you can tell me.’

Rimington’s writing rarely ramps up high suspense, even though one of the youths at the school is in peril; instead, she unspools a web of interconnection, with ramifications in The Moscow Sleepers that resonate with daily news in today’s perilous reality. Neatly plotted but without angst among the characters, the book offers an insightful look at what today’s Security Services really worry about, and how they cope in their half-lit theatre of action.

Looking for the page-turning risks of a Joseph Finder or John Le Carré book? Don’t pick up Rimington. Instead, The Moscow Sleepers offers a sturdy display of espionage agencies wrestling to collaborate via real-life intrigue, with a nice dose of feminine teamwork. It’s a good, if quiet, read, and may yield a better dose of the real thing than most other espionage novels today. 

From Bloomsbury; publication date November 13.

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

Bittersweet Humor, Taut Crime Pacing, in LONDON RULES from Mick Herron

Mick Herron's Slough House series has already drawn a pair of CWA (Crime Writers' Association, UK) silver daggers -- and with this fifth of the full-length "MI5/6" style crime novels in the series, he's hitting some of his best notes yet.

Any reader of John Le Carré already knows the term "Moscow Rules": the keep-safe guidelines for espionage on foreign turf, where every stranger can be ready to sabotage your effort or your life. In a brilliant an enteraining twist, Mick Herron provides "London Rules" -- the conventions of the dog-eat-dog tangle of British espionage agencies competing for government favor, funding, and job security along the Thames and in the adjacent terrain.

LONDON RULES opens (after a dramatic mass murder preface) with an artful discussion of the daylight's revelations in Slough House, home to failed domestic espionage agents who can't be fired -- but can be made supremely miserable and humiliated by repeated assignments to tasks involving phone bills, website listings, and such. In fact, the tiny pocket of underemployment would be an utter failure and disgrace, were it not for its leader, the bright but rather disgusting (verbally, in appearance, and through massive farting) Jackson Lamb. Because Lamb may have the Service's supreme screwballs. But when they get to Slough House, they become HIS screwballs, to torment and mock in conversation and duties ... and to align and operate under the radar when he so chooses, protected by his massive influence, connections, and, sigh, persistent blackmail.

[Lamb's office] is cramped and furtive, like a kennel, and its overpowering theme is neglect. Psychopaths are said to decorate their walls with crazy writing, the loops and whorls of their infinite equations an attempt at cracking the code their life is hostage to. Lamb prefers his walls to do their own talking, and they have cooperated to the extent that the cracks in their plasterwork, their mildew stains, have here and there conspired to produce something that might amount to an actual script ... a moving finger had write before deciding, contrary to the wisdom of the ages to rub out again.

Such pretentious teasing prose is quickly balanced by a sequence of disasters and threats that forces Jackson Lamb to place his "agents" back into play, even as he mocks the chances that they might succeed.

But it's necessary, because as Lamb's rather unpleasant agent Shirley Dander -- on her 62nd drug-free day -- discovers, someone is trying to murder her fellow agent Roderick ("Roddy") Ho. And the grotesque linkages in Slough House mean if one agent's at risk of sudden death, so are they all.

Soon Lamb and his able (if a lot crazy) assistant Catherine Standish take Shirley's side. They even confront one of the superiors trying to shut them down, Emma Flyte, as Flyte argues about that opening mass murder and its sequelae:

"So let's say he's right. Even if the Park [the active security force] don't listen, tell them about it and you've covered your back."

[Lamb responds] "Yeah, not really. Because if these guys are laying waste to the country using a script the Service wrote, there are few lengths the Park won't go to to cover it up. And anyone who knows about it will be in the firing line. Which includes you, if you'd lost count. Don't make the mistake of thinking you'll be safe when they start playing London Rules. Because you're not a suit, Flyte. You're a joe [agent]. And joes are expendable." ... Lamb shrugged. "I'm in no hurry to be elsewhere. But what I'm appealing to are your survival instincts."

Lamb's right. The question is, with London Rules pushing the powerful to protect their own backsides and shove everyone else into the line of fire, how can the Slough House team -- the Slow Horses -- possibly get out of this, both alive and employed?

Series readers already know how quickly Herron can tie these burned-out and substance-abusing agents into knots that are somehow also hilarious, just the way one of Lamb's farts would be if it took place in certain higher offices. LONDON RULES pushes the stakes and the twisted hilarity higher than ever,

Oh sure, you can plunge into LONDON RULES without reading the earlier books first -- think of yourself as stepping through Alice's mirror or down the rabbit hole, and roll with it. Then grab all four preceding titles (reviews here) and have yourself a explosive week of head-shaking, food-spitting laughter.

And somehow or other, Herron always pulls the plot lines back into place in time for a highly satisfying denoument. This time -- well, it's explosive in terms of what's ahead for the series. But if this is your first Slough House book, you'll have to watch really closely to see what the hidden hand is up to as the book reaches its finale.

Herron's books usually reach publication in the United Kingdom first, and Soho Crime (an imprint of Soho Press) brings them across the "pond." Thank goodness.

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

Total Opposite of John Le Carré: Mick Herron Delivers Gritty Espionage With Heart

Yes, I know, saying Mick Herron's British MI5 series that's now two books long -- the first was Slow Horses, reviewed here, and the second is this year's DEAD LIONS -- is "gritty espionage with heart" doesn't sound as though it's the opposite of John Le Carré. But I can't fit the rest of the description into the title bar: funny, clever, ironic, poignant, twisted, and populated by a crew of espionage "failures" whose ability to succeed seems almost accidental. Or, more to the point, they succeed as a by-product of their misplaced loyalty toward each other.

The denizens of "Slough House" -- by the way, "slough" is pronounced to rhyme with wow, leading to the nickname "slow horses" -- are disgraced MI5 spies who know they've been shunted out of the real effort as punishment for their mistakes. Tedious tasks like making lists and building Internet-style archives get assigned to them, in hopes they'll quit on their own and save management the cost of providing for their retirement. Slow Horses introduced them, and it's hard to say that there's a single main protagonist among them. But publisher Soho Crime is calling this the River Cartwright series, so River -- the only one of the team to actually get to the field in this go-round -- might as well be the center. Yet the other characters are at least as memorable, especially Catherine Standish, not-quite-recovered alcoholic, and Jackson Lamb, filling his top-floor shambles of an office with farts. (Now do you see why it's the opposite of Le Carré? I don't think his spies even "belch." Or use the "water closet.")

River has few illusions about the losers he's trapped with at Slough House. But he's already had some surprises in the Slow Horses and keeps them in mind in DEAD LIONS:

River studied [Catherine], an old-fashioned creature whose pale colouring spoke of an indoor life. Her clothes covered her wrist to ankle. She wore hats, for god's sake. He guessed she was fifty-ish, and until the business last year he hadn't paid her much attention; there was little in a wall-hugging woman her age to interest an uptight man of his. But when things had turned nasty she hadn't panicked. She'd even pointed a gun at Spider Webb -- as had River. This shared experience made them fellow-members of a select club.

But is this new awareness enough to get the Slough Horse crew working together? In fact, if the "real" MI5 finds out that the "Slow Horses" are tracking a potential sleeper cell of former Russians n Britain, they won't be allowed to work at all. Who could expect any success?

Well, Jackson Lamb expects it. So, oddly enough, does River, even if he's no longer expert at dealing with things that go right.

From the inside-the-group extortionate moments, to the dangers of messing around behind official channels, Herron sets up a dry and wry chuckle every few pages. And sure, farts are juvenile, but Jackson Lamb may, after all, be using them effectively.

For a book that opens with a cat, ends with a mouse, and serves up what Spider Webb most deserves, this is also a weirdly realistic espionage romp. I'd read another Mick Herron in this series any time.  I'm hoping they'll keep on coming. This one already made a nomination list for the 2013 Golden Dagger ... So, while I wait for the next in the series, I plan to check out Herron's other work, the Sarah Tucker/Zoë Boehm books. But I suspect they won't have the same bittersweet humor and tenderness of Slow Horses and Dead Lions ... hmm, I think Herron's approach has me hooked.