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Spook Street
Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year, 2018
*Soon to be a major TV series starring Gary Oldman*
‘A terrific spy novel’ Ian Rankin
Twenty years retired from the Intelligence Service, David Cartwright still knows where the skeletons are hidden. But when he forgets that secrets are supposed to stay buried, there’s suddenly a target on his back.
His grandson, River, is a ‘slow horse’, a demoted spy pushing paper at Slough House with other no-hopers. With his grandfather under threat, River ditches desk duty and goes rogue to investigate.
Jackson Lamb, the boss at Slough House, worked with David Cartwright back in the day. He knows better than most that this is no innocent old man. So when River’s panic button raises the alarm at Intelligence Service HQ, Lamb will do whatever he thinks necessary to protect an agent in peril.
‘A modern masterpiece’ Irish Times
‘Outstanding’ Daily Telegraph
‘A terrific spy novel’ Ian Rankin
Twenty years retired from the Intelligence Service, David Cartwright still knows where the skeletons are hidden. But when he forgets that secrets are supposed to stay buried, there’s suddenly a target on his back.
His grandson, River, is a ‘slow horse’, a demoted spy pushing paper at Slough House with other no-hopers. With his grandfather under threat, River ditches desk duty and goes rogue to investigate.
Jackson Lamb, the boss at Slough House, worked with David Cartwright back in the day. He knows better than most that this is no innocent old man. So when River’s panic button raises the alarm at Intelligence Service HQ, Lamb will do whatever he thinks necessary to protect an agent in peril.
‘A modern masterpiece’ Irish Times
‘Outstanding’ Daily Telegraph
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Reviews
Immensely satisfying and utterly brilliant
A terrific spy novel: sublime dialogue, frictionless plotting
Mick Herron is an incredible writer and if you haven't read him yet, you NEED to. I read the Jackson Lamb books one after the other and am already desperate for the next one. They are smart, darkly comic and hugely addictive
A captivating series where the intelligence services' misfits and screw-ups become the useful tools of Herron's quite magnificent creation, Jackson Lamb
I love Mick Herron's books more than is decent. Hands down my favourite crime series of the decade . . . Spook Street is a superb novel - fast-paced, original, witty and completely satisfying on every level. I just can't get enough of this brilliant series
In Spook Street Mick Herron returns to the wonderful fallen spies of MI5 in a series that is fast becoming a classic
The dialogue crackles. 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. Give yourself a treat and hurry on down to Spook Street
It's all sheer fun. Herron is spy fiction's great humorist, mixing absurd situations with sparklingly funny dialogue and elegant, witty prose
Slough House provides the hub for Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb spy novels, of which Spook Street is the fourth, a series that is by some distance the most impressive new body of work in spy fiction
Mick Herron's outstanding series is extremely funny
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
Herron's series of novels about a group of deadbeat spies - or 'slow horses', in spook parlance - has been hailed as the most exciting thing to hit the genre since George Smiley hung up his mackintosh
Spook Street is written with a wry, sardonic wit that will make you laugh out loud as you are taken on a gripping thrill ride
The new spy master
Mick Herron's Spook Street began with an atrocity targeted at teenagers, which seemed horribly prescient come the Manchester Arena attack in May. But it's these discomfiting dips into the real world that give Herron's entertaining series about incompetent MI5 rejects its depth
The long and enduring power of Le Carré leaves British espionage fiction a cramped space for newcomers. Mick Herron has carved out his own distinctive territory . . . Chief cowboy of the slow horses, Jackson Lamb, whose vulgar hedonism would be enough to make Falstaff look like Philip Hammond, is becoming one of crime fiction's great characters
This is irresistible writing suggesting a lovechild of le Carre and Joseph Heller's Catch-22: ironclad storytelling and off-kilter humour
This fourth in Herron's series of novels about Slough House, the department for disgraced spies, combines a terrorist attack, the murder of an old spymaster, and a mysterious fire to create a brilliantly plotted - and witty - addition
A modern masterpiece
The lavishly loathsome Jackson Lamb oversees the action with all the finesse of a shark in a swimming pool
