Book review - Spook Street by Mick Herron: Top spy thriller

I first came across Mick Herron last year when I reviewed Real Tigers, Herron’s third book in the Slough House series. Spook Street is number four in the series, a book I’ve been waiting for which means expectations have been high!

So, what’s it about? Slough House is the Intelligence Service’s place of exile for washed up spooks that can’t be fired or just pensioned off.  The team is led by Jackson Lamb, an odd character that you should never turn your back to or underestimate, simply because he’s rude and abrasive.  He’s also enormously protective of his team of no hopers, although he never openly shows it.  River Cartwright is one of Lamb’s original team of rejects, whose father, known affectionately as the OB (old bastard) was also in the intelligence services.  

Long retired, the OB is succumbing to dementia and the risk is that one day he may blurt out some of the many secrets he’s go locked up in his ageing mind.  Perhaps that’s what leads someone to try to kill him and seemingly succeeded in River too.  The novel follows Lamb and his team figuring out the who, what and why of this mystery, quickly making the link to a horrific suicide bombing at a shopping centre.  It seems the OBs past isn’t as dead as everyone thought it was!

So what did I think?  Absolutely loved it! The cast of misfits and no hopers is great and superbly stitched together into a wonderful tapestry of action by Lamb – he’s coarse and vulgar but sharp as a tack, energising his team in a way only he can, to get to the bottom of the conundrum of why someone tried to kill the OB.  The plot is great building on the backstory of the Slough House characters we’ve met in previous novels and the simple idea of what do you do with retired spooks who know too much and start getting careless about who they talk to.  Its underpinned by a sinister thread running through the novel of Machiavellian plotting and cover up by the mainstream intelligence services, who simply can’t be trusted with anything.

And the pace.  Fantastic – a mix of action, understated tension and some genuine noir scenes that build into a brilliant crescendo.  Oh, one more thing – Herron has no worries about killing off characters, so don’t be surprised by the body count, or by whose corpses are being counted on the kill list.

Final verdict – a cracking book.  A spy novel that reflects the cynical age that we live in, which makes it exactly the kind of book that I want to be reading.  Good as a standalone novel, but if you’ve not read the other three, you’re really missing out on a treat – read them all!

Romancrimeblogger