Kerry Hood was in publishing for many years, working in publicity for several publishers over the time, working on fiction and non-fiction titles. Crime and thrillers have always been those she turns to first, however, and the ones she reads late at night or when she has a quiet moment.
There can be few greater treats than taking a seat with a new Mick Herron novel in your hands. It is an easy decision to get on board for this journey, but it is still a bit like climbing into a hitherto unexplored and shrouded in confusion fairground ride. Unpredictable, painfully exciting, terrifyingly real and stupefying mystifying, there is nothing in the world that will prise your fingers from the edge of the seat. Even at the end, you want to go round again, teeth gritted, eyes streaming – this is raw excitement, and if it could be bottled ….
Herron writes with elegance and honesty that makes him the best spy thriller writer around currently. He bluffs and double-bluffs with a panache that makes the plot unpredictable and impossible to second guess. His prose is silky with descriptions that ease into his sentences – so much so that this reviewer decided (unwisely) to quote one of the best ones here. The book ended up looking like a mythical war bonnet, with scraps of paper making the pages where one of these jewels was to be found. So they are all staying on the pages where readers can find them for themselves.
If you are new to the Slough House series, then you are lucky, and if you are several books in and panting for more – here you are! And to top it all, River Cartwright is back. Something his fans have been waiting noisily for. At the very heart of the story is bribery and revenge. Grudges and mistakes made years ago, and retribution the name of the game. But it is a deadly one, and Herron doesn’t shy away from losing his characters. It is only a question of who goes, how and why.
Politically, there can be no doubt who some of the people in the book are based on, and there are very, very few writers who would dare to give his characters as rude, punchy and downright unattractive habits and conversation as Mick Herron does for his no-hope losers, whose mishap spying careers have driven them downwards into the backwater that is Slough House. Having said that, it is one of the brilliant things about his books. There are no holds barred, and somehow that makes all the inmates more likeable, and you know they will go into battle for themselves and each other at the drop of a confrontational hat. As will the impossibly shoddy Jackson Lamb, their boss, who Gary Oldman has taken on in the splendid Slow Horses AppleTV+ series that is out now.
There really aren’t enough superlatives for this series, or this new one - out now.
