The Secret Hours - Mick Herron

 I'm fairly sure I have reviewed all Herron's Slow Horses novel on this blog.   I had never even heard of The Secret Hours, Herron's latest book, and started it on the assumption that it is a standalone.   In fact it is much more.   Herron has excelled himself here, and I already held him in the highest esteem.

We start off with a retired spy under attack in his rural Devon bolthole.   Then we move to the Monochrome Inquiry, set up by a debased PM who earlier lost his job as Foreign Secretary when he allowed Russian agents to instal a dating app on his phone.   We are particularly interested in Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, Monochrome's attached civil servants, who are summoned to the Park by First Desk and informed in no uncertain terms that the inquiry is going precisely nowhere.

But then a kerfuffle in a supermarket sees Malcolm with a top secret file in his shopping.   He shows Griselda.   They copy the file and email to inquiry members.   Suddenly Monochrome is very much going somewhere.   They even a witness, who appears under the name Alison North, the name she used in the early Nineties when she was sent to Berlin by the legendary David Cartwright to 'check on procedures.'

Alison tells the panel what happened there.   About Head of Station Robin Bruce, a hopeless and doomed romantic, the actual man in charge Brinsley Miles, and Miles's friend Otis, the subject of the leaked file.   Who Miles really is - we can guess but even to the very last page we are never formally told.   Likewise Alison's identity is cunning held back until the climax of her time in Berlin.

Meanwhile Max Janacek, the allotted name of the Devon retiree, has made his way to London and looked up his supposed protectors at the Park's Housekeeping Department, notably John Bachelor, the drink-sodden milkman we have met before.   This is where Herron's great gift for characterisation kicks in.   Bachelor might be a sloppy drunk but he was once a professional, and even he can ride to the rescue in an emergency, which he does here.

What we have in The Secret Hours is an arm's length review of everything Herron has achieved to date.   It is his spy world, his spies and their back story.   Half the fun is guessing who's who.   Herron is too skillful to simply play games.   He seasons his complex story with regular surprises - not least, at the end, for First Desk.   Even Jackson Lamb would doff his proverbial cap to her for that.

A work of genius.

Slough House - Mick Herron

 

Slough House has been deleted from the Regent Park mainframe.  The Slow Horses are being tailed.  Ex-Slow Horses are being tracked down and killed.  Jackson Lamb, for all his innumerable faults, is not going to tolerate things happening to his joes - which is bad news for those who commit such affronts.

Diana Taverner, first desk at the Park, has meanwhile dabbled with privatisation.  Not for personal gain, of course, but because the GRU have been sending over idiots to spread toxic chemicals around English cities.  This turns out to be a mistake on many levels, not least of which is that, in her hour of need, she has to turn to Jackson Lamb.

Also back in the frame is Sid (Sidonie) Baker, who once took a bullet for River Cartwright, is back from the dead, hiding out at the country house River just inherited from the Old Bastard.  She thinks she is being pursued by Mormon missionaries.  The Yellow Vests are venting on the streets of London and Jackson Lamb meets a gay American of restricted growth who believes his boyfriend has been murdered on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

Mick Herron's alternative take on the Secret Service is back for a seventh anarchic romp - the best to date in my opinion.  The critical take on contemporary Britain is absolutely on the nose and there were many laugh out loud moments.  Herron is also excellent on the suspense, where needed, and the car chase through benighted rural Kent was beautifully done.  A masterpiece of its kind.