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.

Real Tigers

Mick Herron’s Real Tigers is an example of why I love the crime/espionage genre. This is the fourth book in the Slough House series, and I’ve already raved about the first three books. This new one won the Golden Dagger aware of the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom in 2016, so it’s obvious that a lot of people are on board with me about that.

This story continues the saga of protagonist Jackson Lamb, one of the most vile and disgusting characters I’ve ever known to be written into the role of hero. He’s a disgusting human being, hardly the guy you would imagine riding to the rescue of others, but it’s what he does. In this fourth book, one of Lamb’s Slough House subordinates, Catherine Standish, is kidnapped. Catherine is an alcoholic who has been sober for a while, but she seems to fragile that when she disappeared, her colleagues initially assumed that she was off on a bender. But then River Cartwright, another Slough House character was caught trying to smuggle ultra top secret documents out of a secure location – he had been compromised in an extortion plot to get Catherine’s release. For Slough House, an operation that rarely saw anything more exciting that a paper cut, this was a remarkable series of events. The documents in question had to do with background information about the new political appointment, Peter Judd, to the position of Home Secretary, the ultimate boss of MI5 (Regent’s Park) and Slough House. Judd had been Regent’s Park harshest and loudest critic because it served his political ambitions. Interestingly, Judd’s own application to “The Service” had been turned down three decades earlier because he was a narcissistic sociopath.

But the intrigue also had to do with the head of MI5, Dame Ingrid Tearney and one of her second desks, Diana Taverner (“Lady Di”). It was no secret that Taverner coveted Tearney’s job, but given they were close to the same age and were approaching retirement age, Lady Di’s time was running out. Yes, Herron brings all these plots together with more great characters, while further developing the background about Lamb and his cast of underlings (Roderick Ho, Marcus Longridge, Louisa Guy, Standish, and Cartwright). This is an excellent book, but don’t start the Slough House series with this one – read the Slow Horses first. Herron is a master story teller and his use of language is particularly enjoyable. I’ve already downloaded, the next book in the series, Spook Street, which was just released.

The List

The List is Mick Herron’s third book in the Slough House series, except this one is a novella which can be read in an hour. I’ve raved about the first two full-length novels, so check out the blog for those reviews. It seems that he has used this book to set up a clever new character for the ensuring stories. In the process, Herron explained the world of spies, double agents, and triple agents. Which of those will Hannah Weiss turn out to be?

Dieter Hess was thought by MI6 to be a double agent. He was an East German who had come over to the West, retired in England. But then Dieter died and of course, “When a spy passes, his cupboards need clearing out.” His papers indicated that he had a previously unknown source of income, something MI6 hadn’t know about, and his handler, John Bachelor was called on the carpet for not knowing about it. By deciphering Dieter’s coded language, Bachelor figured out that Dieter had been running a network of spies. But the list of them did not make sense until Bachelor determined that the list was a “phantom network.” Dieter had just stolen the identities of some apparently innocent folks, all with vague German ties, so he could demand some money to pay them, but then keep the money for himself. His spy retirement funds were so meager, that small amounts of money made a big difference to his quality of life.

Of course, the Germans (allies yes, but there were still these spy things going on) knew the names of Dieter’s alleged spies, and Bachelor wondered if he could use one of them and turn them against the Germans, to create a spy where none had existed before. That’s where Hannah Weiss comes into the story. She was the one who Bachelor chose and she was a willing participant – but what if the whole thing was a setup by the Germans to begin with? That’s where this series of very well written espionage novels seems to be headed.

In the course of this book, Herron further developed the character his main protagonist, Jackson Lamb, and of Diana Taverner, “the ice queen,” one of the bosses at Regent’s Park, the MI6 headquarters. This author and this series get my strong recommendation. I’ve already acquired the fourth book in the series.

Dead Lions

Dickie Bow had been out the spy game for a long time, but he wanted back in. He had never been an important spy, never one trusted with an important task, but he was a lifelong “street walker,” someone who knew how to tale someone without being seen, someone who could blend into the background without raising suspicion. And, he was the one guy who had actually seen a legendary spy, Alexander Popov. But was Popov even real? But Dickie didn’t always stay hidden, and that’s why his body was found on a bus. His cell phone had an unsent one-work text, “cicadas.” That was enough to interest some people at MI5, and some of the tasks that needed to be done to investigate what Dickie was after were assigned to the Slow Horses.

Dead Lions is the second book in a 5 book series, Slough House. All of the characters in the Slough House are spies who screwed up, who blew an assignment. Because it is not so easy to fire a spy, MI5 chose to give them the most boring of assignments as a way of inducing a voluntary retirement. None of the slow horses had ever gotten to return to Regent’s Park where the real MI5 brain trust worked, and like Dickie, they all wanted back in the game they had trained for.

Cicadas, insects that stay buried for 17 years before emerging to activity, was a clue that somewhere in England lived a Russian sleeper cell which was being activated 21 years after the Berlin Wall came down.

The cast of characters that author Mick Herron introduced in the first book, Slow Horses, are as intesting as the characters of Louise Penny or even Daniel Silva – and that is remarkably high praise. The primary protagonist is Jackson Lamb, who unlike penny’s Armand Gamache or Silva’s Gabriel Allon, is not refined or likeable. Really, he is a most disgusting creature with vile and extreme habits. But is at the top of the Slough House for a reason, and he knew Dickie Bow from their days together in Berlin during the height of the Cold War. Along with Lamb are the slow horses about whom we learned more, River Cartright, Roderick Ho, Min Marper, Louisa Guy, Catherine Standish. Herron introduces a couple new ones, Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander, which allows him to kill off one of the others. 

The character development, main plot, and subplots all are fantastic. Herron has written 11 novels, and I’ve now reviewed two of them. I’ve already downloaded the third and fourth books of the Slough House series. We at MRB have a new author to get excited about. These books get my very strong recommendation.

 

Slow Horses

Mick Herron is the author of 10 books, and his 11^th is due out in 2017. Slow Horses, written in 2010, is the first in a five-novel series called Slough House, about Jackson Lamb, an old English Spy who is not quite ready to go quietly into retirement. I was intrigued beginning with the first sentence, “This is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses.” In Britain’s spy system, the slow horses are spies who screwed up assignments or even training exercises, not bad enough to be fired, but not good enough to be trusted with any meaningful work. For men and women who dreamed of and who trained to be an integral part of covert action, the assignment to the Slough House was akin to a slow death. Regents Park was the site of the people who were involved in the game in which everyone at Slough House wanted to be a part. Everyone at Slough House hoped to be invited back to Regents Park, but that had never happened. When Ingrid Tearney, the big boss at Regents Park, was out of town, leadership fell to “Second Desk” Diana Taverner, know to all as Lady Di, a derogative term, and no one would have ever said that to her face.

Jackson Lamb sat on the top floor of Slough House and ran the show there, although the reason for his assignment to the Slow Horses was never revealed as it was for the other characters. Lamb was a no-nonsense character who was absolutely disgusting in and unapologetic for his personal habits. Cartwright is a young buck, grandson of a spy legend, talented, intuitive, but he got put on the shelf because of his alleged failure to stop a bomb from going off in the London subway. The bomb never went off, his failure was only in a dress rehearsal practice event, but that was enough for Lady Di to send him to the Slow Horses.

But, the Slow Horses got a chance at action when Lady Di inexplicably asked for their help to rescue a kidnap victim. At first, the identity of the victim was unknown and it was assumed that Al Qaeda got him – that it was another terrorist event to strike in Britain’s homeland. However, the victim turned out to be Hassan Ahmed, a native born Brit of Pakistani heritage. Herron wrote of the kidnap victim, “Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself – it likes the echoes its wingbeats make. It likes the smell of its own farts.” The kidnappers threatened to behead Hassan and display the act online. It was Lamb who figured out the kidnappers weren’t from Al Qaeda: “Somebody somewhere will be using words fight fire with fire. Some other dickhead’ll be saying that what works in Karachi workds just as well in Birmingham…. They’re home-grown fuckwits who think they’re taking it back to the enemy.”

Meanwhile, Robert Hobden, a has-been journalist with right wing beliefs was desperately looking for one more story to bring him back into media’s limelight. In short, there was a wonderful plot of insider fighting among Britain’s covert operatives and administrators while solving this crime and rescuing the victim was at risk.

I was taken by the plot, the characters, the dialogue, and the narrative language, so I’ve already acquired the second book in the series, Dead Lions. I heard about this book and author while listening to an NPR show with Nancy Pearl who raved about the story. I agree, and I plan to pay more attention to Ms. Pearl’s recommendations (worth a plug – it’s www.nancypearl.com).

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