Spook Street
Mick Herron
ISBN: 9781616956479
Published: February, 2017
Pricing
Paperback $16.95
More books by Mick Herron
Description
What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for those who know too many secrets but don’t remember they’re secret? Or does someone take care of the senile spy for good?
These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sl...
What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for those who know too many secrets but don’t remember they’re secret? Or does someone take care of the senile spy for good?
These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sliding into dementia, and questions his grandson, River, must figure out answers to now that the spy who raised him has started to forget to wear pants. But River, himself an agent at Slough House, MI5’s outpost for disgraced spies, has other things to worry about. A bomb has detonated in the middle of a busy shopping center and killed forty innocent civilians. The “slow horses” of Slough House must figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates.
Media
“The Guardian Best Books of 2017.”
“An Irish Times Best Book of 2017.”
“All espionage aficionados are—or soon will be—reading Herron. But it’s high time, too, that readers of literary fiction embrace him in the way they have John le Carré.”
–Booklist, Starred Review on Spook Street
“Terrific spy novel . . . Sublime dialogue, frictionless plotting.”
—Ian Rankin, via Twitter
“Terrific... A heady mixture of deadpan humor, deft characterizations, and acute insight.”
–Publishers Weekly, Starred Review on Spook Street
“Droll, fast-paced, and with a cast of crazy characters, you wouldn’t want to work at Slough House but you certainly want to read about it. ”
–Bookgasm on Spook Street
“Stylistically, you can draw comparisons with the work of Raymond Chandler, though Herron keeps a tighter grasp on his narrative than Chandler ever did... Herron is a master of timing, word by word, sentence by sentence. His language creates its own world, with streaks of satire and loss that prevent it from becoming too comfortable.”
–The Spectator on Spook Street
“[Herron] is superb at evoking the le Carré-esque air of ennui, cynicism and self-loathing which permeates an intelligence service on its uppers, but which remains – the alternative being too awful to contemplate – duty bound to keep calm and carry on.... Herron also leavens the mood with flashes of mordant humour, while the hilariously repellent Jackson Lamb – the anti-Smiley – is a constant source of politically incorrect one-liners.”
–The Irish Times on Spook Street
“It’s not often a reviewer can say, “You’ve never read anything quite like this” but it’s a safe encomium to use in the case of Mick Herron. The author’s idiosyncratic writing is unique in his genre: the spycraft of le Carré refracted through the blackly comic vision of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.”
–Financial Times on Spook Street
“Terrific... it’s a real pleasure to watch the super-smart if damaged Slough House agents rising to the occasion.”
–The Seattle Review of Books on Spook Street
“[Herron] does it all with a darkly deadpan humor that is as scathingly funny as it is irreverent. There’s no let up, no let down, it’s one hell of a tale told masterfully.”
–Open Letters Monthly on Spook Street
“Snappy dialog, crafty twists... I've enjoyed each of the books in this series and always find them hard to put down.”
–A Fresh Fiction "Fresh Pic"
“Laced with black humor, this intense fourth in the series won the 2017 Steel Dagger Award.”
–Reviewing the Evidence
“The lavishly loathsome Jackson Lamb oversees the action with all the finesse of a shark in a swimming pool.”
–Metro (UK)
“A Metro (UK) Best Crime Novel of 2017.”