It reminded me a lot of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, with its complex motivations and use of an agent perhaps past his best-before date. If you haven’t read him but enjoy a smart British thriller, you need to try him, starting absolutely anywhere. This is not like the Slough House series, except for some of the wonderful turns of phrase and some of the grittier action.

Although he had given his testimony behind a screen, there were many in the McGarry clan who would be quite pleased to get their hands on Bettany for betraying them. In anticipation of Mick Herron’s US release of London Rules, the fifth book in his Slough House series, I’m doing a re-read of the first four books. He’d spent the better part of a decade taking [X X] off the board only to find that others had filled the gap. I loved his Slough House series, am currently enjoying his Oxford Investigations series and totally enjoyed this stand alone book.K. Coe (unofficially) with a message: a “do not disturb” on one name, an implication of responsibility for another. Even if Slough House means nothing to you I'd still recommend Nobody Walks as a standalone thriller. Herron strips his revenge story to the bone, paring away unnecessary characters, episodes, speeches and gestures to produce a violent little elegy that grows both more clever and more sour as it hurtles along. By the time all is revealed, you realize the answer to what’s been going on was staring you in the face the whole time. With Driscoll having recently been vetted for national honours, Dame Ingrid Tearney wants to deal with the situation very discreetly, so she enlists JK Coe, a still wet-behind-the-ears officer from Psych Eval, to act as go-between.

In this book, readers discover what happened to JK Coe prior to becoming a slow horse and why he is a little, ahem, jumpy. Coe finds himself pulled from behind a desk to do her bidding and his initial euphoria of being chosen by her, ends in fear and disillusionment, as we discover why he acts as he does in later books.in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter. You can find a recent podcast on Irish Times with Herron when he released Joe Country, one of the Slough House series, a favorite of mine.

But more than a few people are interested to hear Bettany is back in town, from incarcerated mob bosses to those in the highest echelons of MI5. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added. The wheels within wheels of double-think seem obvious in retrospect, but would never be serious thoughts for me, a general member of the public.

He was in France for a reason – leaving behind an old life (the one where he neglected his wife and son), but never really finding another. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. Tom Bettany works in a meat packing facility in France when he hears that his son, Liam, is dead, killed by a fall from his balcony. When my snoring lemon woke me last night, I made reading lemonade until I fell asleep with the book on my belly. Dame Ingrid Tearney – Head of MI5 and someone with so many nefarious plans in the air she could join the circus as a juggler.