Spook House

Spook House is the fifth and most recent in Mick Herron’s Slough House series. I’ve been a fan since I read the first one, Slow Horses, and I can only hope that Herron will make this an ongoing saga. The characters, especially Jackson Lamb, but also River Cartwright, Diana Taverner, Roderick Ho, and Louisa Guy, but this book adds J. K. Coe, Emma Flyte, and Claude Whelan. This a cast rich with character, both assets and liabilities which Herron’s exploits beautifully.

If you’ve gotten this far in the Slough House books, you don’t need to know much more about the plot – but it is complex enough to keep the conclusion hidden without being overly convoluted. What happens when an old spook, in this case David Cartwright, grandfather of River, starts to develop dementia? What about the secrets he knows and what about his fading ability to keep secrets and know the good guys from the bad guys? What about old plans and secrets that suddenly come to the surface, so that people who are now in charge have to deal with them? The final scenes are incredible, and it kept me reading late into the night to get to the end.