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.

SLOUGH HOUSE: Mick Herron's 7th Tongue-in-Cheek London Spy Novel

If you live with other people, or have members of your pod stopping by while you're reading, you might want to warn them that you'll be reading the next Mick Herron "slow horses" espionage delight — the people in my living space kept showing up with the bewildered question, "You're reading a spy novel and you're laughing out loud??"

SLOUGH HOUSE builds on the escapades and character revelations of the previous books, and it's even funnier and, ironically, more heart-breaking if you've read the other titles (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and Joe Country). But it's still an excellent and compelling read if you plunge into it as your first visit to "Slough House," the building and department where MI5 dumps its staff failures. An alcoholic, a dance-crazy coke addict, a brilliant hacker with an ardent fantasy life involving how "hot" he is, a despairing staffer who'd been framed for pedophilia (guess how fast his fiancée left him), and the espionage-born-and-bred River Cartwright himself, in some ways the straight man among these various delightful nut cases. Most of all, the department circles around its head of operations, Jackson Lamb, a deceptively fat and farting slob whose skills in espionage, sorting out international intrigue, and even attacking the opposition physically are far better than those of his treacherous superior, Diana Taverner.

Here's a classic moment as the team waits for Lamb to show at a planned meeting:

A door banged, not the one from the yard, but the toilet on the floor below. So Lamb had floated in and up several flights of stairs without fluttering a cobweb on the way. It was unnerving to picture him doing this, like imagining a tapir playing hopscotch. The smell of stale cigarettes entered the room a moment before him, and the slow horses made way for it, then Lamb, by shuffling to either side. He arrived among them shaking his head in wonderment. "What a dump."

... He threw himself into his chair, which, one happy day, was going to respond by disintegrating into a hundred pieces. "Sorry to keep you waiting. I was up late comforting a gay American dwarf."

It's quickly evident that only Lamb, despite his crude language and behavior, would have noticed and listened to the story of that American, who had showed up unexpectedly in a room full of ex-spies who were saying goodbye to an old-time espionage meeting place being closed down.

That attentiveness to small details that in fact reveal Russian operations in Britain is half of what Lamb excels at; the other important half is the way he shepherds his group of failed spies, people who can't be easily fired because they know too much, but can be corralled where they may not hurt serious business. Lamb's robust verbal abuse and bluntness feel humiliating, but also give the staff a focus beyond their own misery. 

Besides, Diana Taverner, head of MI5, has already done something far more humiliating to the "slow horses" department: set them up as targets for her own spies-in-training. Her mistake here is underestimating how far Lamb will go in response, to defend his bizarre team. But she's got problems, and would be the first to admit it: For Diana, "it turned out that the actual cost of having someone whacked remained one of those subjects too embarrassing to discuss in public, so that wasn't subjected to intense scrutiny either." And having set this up, funded by political forces she's misunderstood, Diana is in a serious mess ... and trying to pass the dirt downhill to Jackson Lamb's department. As she soon discovers, "that was the thing about shit, real or fake: once you'd begun spreading it about, it never ended up precisely where you wanted it."

Herron's espionage is highly realistic and well salted with views of the ridiculous — expect sudden guffaws or long laughs. (Good treatment for pandemic-induced depression.) Ironically or inevitably, it's also strung around some bizarre forms of love and loyalty in action. Plus Herron provides a crystal-clear view of modern British politics and even the American disaster. All of this makes SLOUGH HOUSE far more than a good read. It's worth reading twice, shelving, and pulling out again a few months later. Where else are you going to have so much fun while isolated and waiting for your vaccine? (Don't answer that. Listen to Jackson Lamb instead.)

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.

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. 

British Spies Who Break Your Heart, from Mick Herron, SPOOK STREET

Mick Herron has done it again -- written an espionage novel where the characters might as well be members of your own family. (Maybe they are, and Herron just changed the names.) It's the fourth in his Slough House series of British "spooks" who've made major mistakes in their careers and have ended up in a painfully humiliating backwater of spydom, headed by the unpleasant, unclean, and constantly flatulant Jackson Lamb.

And if SPOOK STREET were just a riff on this situation, the misery of being labeled a career failure with no way to regain a decent spying slot, or the black humor of a physically disgusting boss in a falling-down building, well, who'd want to read it?

But instead, it's a vivid and achingly sad (and also terrifyingly funny!) mingling of the once cream of the crop, still smart and savvy but isolated, with their humanity way out in front of them. There's Louisa Guy, expecting (with mixed feelings) a sexual come-on from one of the younger men in the group, River Cartwright; the midlife stylish Roderick Ho, a genius on a computer but a disaster at reading his colleagues; the new and apparently both crazy and dangerous colleague JK Coe, whose PTSD seems to live in his fingers, which keep fingering an invisible piano in an effort to drown out what he remembers. And more.

The thing is, they all care about each other. Well, maybe not Coe -- he's too new to matter much -- but all the others hiss and spit and in the long run would lay down their lives to save each other, as dry-drunk Catherine Standish did in an earlier book of the series, and River Cartwright has, too. Even Jackson Lamb himself somehow cares, if only to spite the other Secret Service teams: If you're one of his "joes," he won't let you drown. Much.

So in spite of their frequent mistakes and bad language, the washed-up spies of Slough House grabbed a bit of my heart long ago. In this fourth title, the office sniping and insults fall way short of the disaster that's taking place: River Cartwright's once-famous grandfather, who still know enough to sink the Secret Service (which is one reason River is at Slough House, not out on the street), has dementia. At what point will the mainstream spy network discover this fatal failing? Will someone try to take advantage of the elder Cartwright (known mostly as the O.B., which does not stand for Old Boy, but Old B--, well, you know)? Or will he be mercifully executed before he can spill his dangerous old secrets? That's River's problem in terms of his aging grandfather. A very big problem.

Louisa had said: Yeah, I wasn't actually suggesting they'd have him murdered, though I can see you've put some thought into that.

But how could he, his grandfather's grandson, not have done?

And what really worries me, River had wanted to tell her, is that he's always loved telling stories. Even now, visits meant sitting in the O.B.'s study, sharing a drink and hearing secrets. That these had grown confused, frequently petering out down lanes that led nowhere, didn't mean they were no longer secret, and the thought of the O.B. on his daily pilgrimage round the village -- butcher, baker, post office lady -- weaving for all the same webs he'd spun for River, had kept him awake two nights on the trot.

It turns out River's right to be concerned, and nearly too late, as Jackson Lamb soon finds himself identifying a former spy's body for the police ... but who has shot whom? And what does all of this have to do with River's missing mother, and his unknown father? Not to mention the terrorism that starts the plot spinning?

By the time everything is "sorted," we know a lot more about each of the Slough Horses, especially River, but also the inimitable Catherine Standish, and even the mysterious JK Coe.

I don't know how I'm going to wait an entire year for the next in this series, from Soho Crime.

Can you jump directly into SPOOK STREET without having read Slow Horses, Dead Lions, and Real Tigers first? Of course you can. Mick Herron is an amazing storyteller, and you'll be just fine.

Besides, your heart won't clench up nearly as hard that way -- because the more you get to know Mick Herron's desperate group of failed spies, the more you'll care about them. I do.

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.

Top British Espionage Fiction: Mick Herron, NOBODY WALKS

The classics in British espionage fiction are by John Le Carré and Graham Greene, and if you love the genre, I hope you've found Charles Cumming and Charles McCarry. I could go on with the authors whose spy novels brush against Britain, too, like Olen Steinhour. Such good books, to feed that hunger for complexity, political savvy, and long-term insight into our world!

And then there are the less known authors who'll surely climb to these heights over time. Of all the contenders at the moment, Mick Herron is one of my top picks. His two books in the Slough House series, Slow Horses and Dead Lions, gave me laughter, heartache, and insight, and I hoped Soho Crime would bring us more in US editions.

The start of NOBODY WALKS seemed like a new series -- working in a meat processing plant in France, rough ne-er-do-well Tom Bettany gets a cellphone message that his 26-year-old son Liam has fallen to his death, and because Bettany lives such a hard life, the message barely reaches him in time to let him get to the funeral in England. Detective Sergeant Welles, investigating the death (Liam was stoned on a balcony -- alone? or not?), actually gives Bettany a ride to the funeral service, where there's nobody he knows, and one lone name that he recognizes, that of his son's apparent girlfriend, who'd also left him a voicemail.

Slowly, Bettany's past flickers into focus, and it's violent and laden with secrets. Could his son's death be related? Hadn't Bettany walked away from his government-related career as well as his family, immersing himself in gory, physically demanding work in another country -- wasn't that enough?

But nobody walks away from that kind of career, it seems. And gradually I found connections between Bettany and the espionage setting of the Slough House series, in the same way that a Tana French book will lead back to the Dublin Murder Squad, or a Stuart Neville crime will relate to the Troubles and the resulting criminal syndicate -- there is a violence and brutality underneath the civilized English veneer, and it may add up to worse than the slaughterhouse that Bettany knew in France.

Soon Bettany's trudging along grimy, gritty urban streets and alleyways, his son's ashes toted with him, looking for someone to blame -- maybe the drug dealer who'd sold the weed to young Liam?

Bettany walked on, tote bag in hand.

Invisible, painless bullets struck him dead every step of the way.

He visited more pubs, asked more questions. Nobody was glad to see him. Even those who might have cared, who didn't take him for a cop but a parent tracking a runaway, wanted him gone. 

And some of those are willing to hurt him, even kill him, for asking such questions.

The path toward clarity involves professional gamers and game developers, the casual liaisons of the young, and slowly revealed, the cynical cruelty of a profession Bettany thought he'd left far behind him. Herron's narrative style is tightly paced, with every scene, every seeming digression, turning significant ... and what he puts forward about power in the secret rooms of British government is dark, dirty, and all too believable. Not many laughs in this one, except for the choked bitterness of discovery. Liam's death at the start of the book strongly suggests there can be no "happy ending" to Bettany's quest. And things can indeed get worse.

But there's an art to darkness and revelation, and Herron is a master of these. This book goes on my "read it again and again" shelf with Herron's others. I'll be watching for the next. Meanwhile, if you're collecting espionage with depth, suspense with meaning, a good story with a reason for telling it -- get a copy of NOBODY WALKS. Release date February 17, so grab those first printings while you can.