Spook Street

Now a major TV series, Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman

'A terrific spy novel' Ian Rankin

'A modern masterpiece' Irish Times

****

Twenty years retired from the Intelligence Service, David Cartwright still knows where all the bones are buried. But when he forgets that secrets are supposed to stay hidden, there's suddenly a target on his back.

The 'Old Bastard' raised his grandson to be a hero, not a slow horse. Now, far from joining the myths and legends of Spook Street, River Cartwright is part of Jackson Lamb's team of pen-pushing no-hopers at Slough House. Which doesn't mean he won't ditch everything and go rogue when his grandfather comes under threat.

Lamb worked with Cartwright back in the day, and knows better than most that this is no innocent old man. So when a panic button raises the alarm at Intelligence Service HQ, it's Lamb who's called on to identify the body. And it's Lamb who'll do whatever's necessary to protect an agent in peril.

'Outstanding' Daily Telegraph

“A terrific spy novel: sublime dialogue, frictionless plotting”

Ian Rankin
Immensely satisfying and utterly brilliant Sarah Hilary
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
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 provides the hub for Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb spy novels, of which Spook Street is the fourth, a series that is by some distance the most impressive new body of work in spy fiction Irish Times
Mick Herron's outstanding series is extremely funny Daily Telegraph
It's not often a reviewer can say, "You've never read anything quite like this" but it's a safe encomium to use in the case of Mick Herron. The author's idiosyncratic writing is unique in his genre: the spycraft of le Carré refracted through the blackly comic vision of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 Financial Times
Herron's series of novels about a group of deadbeat spies - or 'slow horses', in spook parlance - has been hailed as the most exciting thing to hit the genre since George Smiley hung up his mackintosh Mail on Sunday
Spook Street is written with a wry, sardonic wit that will make you laugh out loud as you are taken on a gripping thrill ride Daily Express
The new spy master Evening Standard
Mick Herron's Spook Street began with an atrocity targeted at teenagers, which seemed horribly prescient come the Manchester Arena attack in May. But it's these discomfiting dips into the real world that give Herron's entertaining series about incompetent MI5 rejects its depth Daily Telegraph, Crime Books of the Year
The long and enduring power of Le Carré leaves British espionage fiction a cramped space for newcomers. Mick Herron has carved out his own distinctive territory . . . Chief cowboy of the slow horses, Jackson Lamb, whose vulgar hedonism would be enough to make Falstaff look like Philip Hammond, is becoming one of crime fiction's great characters Mark Lawson, Guardian, Crime Book of the Year
This is irresistible writing suggesting a lovechild of le Carre and Joseph Heller's Catch-22: ironclad storytelling and off-kilter humour Financial Times, Books of the Year
This fourth in Herron's series of novels about Slough House, the department for disgraced spies, combines a terrorist attack, the murder of an old spymaster, and a mysterious fire to create a brilliantly plotted - and witty - addition Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year
A modern masterpiece Irish Times, Books of the Year
The lavishly loathsome Jackson Lamb oversees the action with all the finesse of a shark in a swimming pool Metro, Crime Novel of the Year

Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, two CWA Daggers, been published in twenty-five languages, and are the basis of a major TV series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He is also the author of the Zoe Boehm series, and the standalone novels Nobody Walks and The Secret Hours. Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.

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