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If you were eager for the latest Slough House novel and were disappointed to learn that Mick Herron's latest is a stand alone, don't fret: it really isn't. Though none of the action occurs in that backwater office for washed-up spies, the new story is populated with familiar figures and features of the Slough House universe: "milkmen" whose job is to check up on retired agents, a frosty first desk, and a system that seems more devoted to internal power struggles than disarming terrorist threats.
The story opens with a bang when a retired man living quietly in the countryside wakes in his bed, aware there is an intruder in the night. We realize immediately the quiet life is not the only one he's led. He leads the shadowy team that has come after him on a frenetic chase and makes his escape (with the aid of a smelly dead badger), gathering up his flight kit and a car hidden away for the purpose, determined to find out who wants to kill him and why.
The story takes an abrupt tonal shift, from frantic action to frozen in place, focusing on the actions (or rather inaction) of Monochrome, a government inquiry into MI5's misconduct ordered by a prime minister with a personal grievance and a plan to outsource critical functions to the private sector. The inquiry has been stymied through a bureaucratic checkmate devised by the wily First Desk, unable to get any documents to inform their work until someone manages to slip a confidential file into member's shopping cart. They are finally able to call a witness to a scandal, and she has quite a story to tell.
Another shift, this time into the past, when as a novice member of the intelligence service the witness was dispatched to Berlin just a few years after the wall came down. She is ostensibly there to clean up routine record-keeping but is actually assigned to find dirt on a free-wheeling seasoned agent. In contrast to Monochrome, this fictional Berlin is vividly colorful, but the motivations of the British intelligence services in goth time frames are consistently self-serving and devious. As the hard-bitten agent points out, "the job is about betrayal. About persuading people to betray other people. Their countries, their friends, those they work for. And in return, we betray them too in the end."It's a bleak vision, redeemed in a small way by a few people who are loyal to their field agents and, though it's masked in cynicism, to a higher ideal than internecine backstabbing.
In some ways this is a colder, darker book than the Slough House adventures, though with the same flashes of bitter wit and lampooning of familiar political figures and trends. Though he goes unnamed, Boris Johnson is part of the story. So is the Tory government, bent on hobbling public service and selling it off for parts. There are characters who have long lived on Herron's Spook Street – some like David Cartwright with familiar names and others with unfamiliar names but unmistakable personal styles.
As a sort of prequel with themes that rhyme with the present, readers new to Herron's espionage novels can use this portal to be introduced to his world, but the real fun is for those who will recognize old friends.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, November 2023
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