Spook Street by Mick Herron

When River Cartwright’s final training exercise went publicly pear-shaped, he was only kept on the rolls of Britain’s spy service because of his grandfather, David Cartwright, a legend of the service’s Cold War days. Now, though, the Old Bastard, as he is widely known — sometimes affectionately, sometimes less so — is showing his age. It’s not just that his attention is wandering and his memory is going, it’s that his memory is also starting to leak. Showing up at the village shop in his pyjamas is embarrassing, but not particularly harmful to anything beyond the OB’s dignity. When he starts telling tales that imply he was not the Ministry of Transport official that all of the neighbors thought he was for more than 40 years, well, on the one hand, the service can hope that his fellow villagers think he has grown inventive in his old age. On the other, hope of that sort is not a good basis for a working secret service. Then there is the matter of the gun that he is not supposed to have and the way that he does not keep it in anything resembling a gun safe.

Spook Street does not begin either with River and his fellow Slow Horses plodding through secret service make-work, nor does it begin with the OB potentially spilling service secrets. It begins with a suicide bomber adding a lot of extra flash to a flash mob, turning a moment of spontaneous silliness into a scene of lasting carnage. Dozens dead, and a five-alarm fire for UK law enforcement, which in this case also includes its spying branches. Slough House has some new denizens, thanks to a shake-up after the events depicted in Real Tigers. Moira Tregorian thinks that Jackson Lamb really should get a better grip on his paperwork, and she will be just the person to help with that whenever he shows up again. He’s not been seen at Slough House for several days, and nobody has any idea why. J.K. Coe wears a hoodie often pulled over his head, usually has his headphones on, talks very little, and appears to play an invisible piano on his desktop at various times during the working day. He gives the impression of being psychologically fragile and potentially violent, dropped into Slough House for reasons unexplained.

The story is, as one character says of Jackson Lamb, twistier than a corkscrew. The characters remain true to what Herron has established over the previous three novels, and it’s satisfying to see them continue to be themselves in new and different appalling situations. River goes haring off without telling anyone when he discovers a particular reason to worry about the OB. Roderick Ho shows signs of having a girlfriend, but remains both insufferable and clueless. Marcus and Shirley back each other up while getting on each other’s nerves; neither can overcome their bad habits, but neither pushes the other on those particular issues. They leave that to Jackson Lamb, who does show up at Slough House when things are getting much too interesting for anyone’s good.

One of the pleasures of Spook Street is seeing how Herron apportions knowledge among his characters and readers. There are times when one character tells another something that Herron does not relate. The reader knows that knowledge has been passed on, but cannot know just what it is. At other times in the book, Herron passes along a clue in a scene that other characters are not privy to so that the reader can make a connection just ahead of the characters. Trouble is on its way, or someone is about to get in deeper than they suspected, or they can make headway if they only find out in time what the reader already knows. It keeps this thriller thrilling and pushes the climax far back in the book. (Early Le Carré goes one better: the climax is often after the end of the book, with events doubling or tripling back as you think about what has happened.)

Spook Street packs in plenty of surprises as it hurtles from one desperate situation to another. It’s also a meditation on how long the shadows cast by covert actions really are, and what can happen when some of those shadows take on corporeal form and walk around in the present day.

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Doreen’s review of Spook Street is here.