Spook Street (Slough House)
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for aging spies who can no longer remember their secrets are secret? Or are senile spies taken care of in a different, more permanent fashion?
These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sliding into dementia, and questions his grandson, River, must answer now that the spy who raised him sometimes forgets
to wear pants. But River, himself an agent at Slough House, MI5’s outpost for disgraced spies, has other things to worry about. A bomb has detonated in the middle of a busy shopping center and killed forty innocent civilians. The “Slow
Horses” of Slough House must figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this installment of Mick Herron’s beloved Slough House spy series, the sardonic humor of these disgraced spies stuck in a backwater office takes a back seat to the captivating intrigue. In the aftermath of a seemingly inexplicable terrorist attack, hotheaded agent River Cartwright is growing worried about his beloved grandfather. At one point a legend in MI5, he’s become forgetful in his old age—and that includes forgetting what parts of his past he’s not supposed to talk about. You can feel the tensions rise as River fears the agency’s top brass might help his grandfather stop talking permanently—and not without reason. There’s still plenty of dry wit to be found in Spook Street (the undateable Roderick Ho has somehow found a girlfriend!), but there’s also an oddly perfect sense of melancholy underpinning everything. Veteran narrator Gerard Doyle handles both sides of the story masterfully.