Spook Street: The bestselling thrillers that inspired the hit Apple TV+ show Slow Horses (Slough House Thriller 4)

Immensely satisfying and utterly brilliant - Sarah Hilary

A terrific spy novel: sublime dialogue, frictionless plotting - Ian Rankin

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 - Mark Billingham

A captivating series where the intelligence services' misfits and screw-ups become the useful tools of Herron's quite magnificent creation, Jackson Lamb - Christopher Brookmyre

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 - Antonia Hodgson

In Spook Street Mick Herron returns to the wonderful fallen spies of MI5 in a series that is fast becoming a classic - Daily Express

Stylistically, you can draw comparisons with the work of Raymond Chandler, though Herron keeps a tighter grasp on his narrative than Chandler ever did. But the story takes second place to the prose. 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 - The Spectator

It's all sheer fun. Herron is spy fiction's great humorist, mixing absurd situations with sparklingly funny dialogue and elegant, witty prose - The Times

“Slough House was a branch of the Service, certainly, but ‘arm’ was pitching it strong. As was ‘finger’, come to that; fingers could be on the button or on the pulse. Fingernails, now: those you clipped, discarded, and never wanted to see again. So Slough House was a fingernail of the Service: a fair step from Regent’s Park geographically, and on another planet in most other ways. Slough House was where you ended up when all the bright avenues were closed to you. It was where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it” Spook Street is the fourth book in the Slough House series by British author, Mick Herron. Jackson Lamb is hungover, par for the course, but not the best state for dealing with a problem of this magnitude. David Cartwright, Service legend and grandfather of one of his Slough House crew, has apparently shot and killed his grandson. River Cartwright had been worried that the O.B., subsiding into dementia, would do something silly and dangerous, and that does seem to be what has now happened. Elsewhere in London, Security Services are investigating a flash-mob gathering that was targeted by a suicide bomber, leaving forty-two dead. The two events would appear to be unrelated, but the identities of those involved begin to suggest otherwise. Bad Sam Chapman, David Cartwright’s back-up, back in the day, is now working as a PI, but a man with his Service training knows when he’s being followed. They may be “…exiled to Slough House with the other catastrophes of the intelligence world; sentenced to plough away at a series of unpromising projects with no end in sight…” but when the Slough House crew realise someone is trying to kill Sam, Jackson decides they are “operational”. And when this bunch of misfits takes to the streets and the computers, who knows what might happen. Herron gives his characters smart, snappy dialogue; his plot is imaginative but also wholly believable, with several twists and turns to keep it interesting; there’s a bit of double entendre and plenty of humour (much of it black) that will have readers snickering, giggling and laughing out loud. As the fourth instalment of a series, it doubtless contains some spoilers for earlier books, but can easily be read as a stand-alone. Almost certainly, many readers will be seeking out the rest of the series and more of Herron’s creations. Clever and original, this is brilliant British spy fiction. With thanks to Bookstr and Hachette Australia for this copy to read and review.

Marianne Vincent