Spook Street (Slough House Series #4)

by Mick Herron Narrated by Gerard Doyle

Overview

A thrilling fourth installment in the CWA Gold Dagger-winning Slough House series. What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for those who know too many secrets but don't remember they're secret? Or does someone take care of the senile spy for good? These are the questions River Cartwright must ask when his grandfather, a Cold War-era operative, starts to forget to wear pants and begins to suspect everyone in his life has been sent by the Service to watch him. But River has other things to worry about. A bomb goes off in the middle of a busy shopping center and kills forty innocent civilians. The agents of Slough House have to figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/19/2016
In Herron’s terrific, and terrifically funny, fourth Slough House novel (after 2016’s Real Tigers), London’s intelligence teams are on full alert after a suicide bomber kills dozens in a mall. But at Slough House, the home of British spies put out to pasture, the immediate need is to investigate the possible murder of one of its own, River Cartwright, apparently shot while seeing to his grandfather David Cartwright, a former powerful member of the Service, now a paranoid old man. Those in charge quickly figure out the people responsible for the bombing but don’t understand the motive. Meanwhile, the Slough House team, led by the despicable Jackson Lamb, tries to figure out who would go after River. The search leads to France and a recently torched commune, an odd ménage of Americans, Russians, and children. The two plot lines slowly converge amid a heady mixture of deadpan humor, deft characterizations, and acute insight (“A loose bullet rips a hole in normality”). The title refers to a suspicious state of mind: “When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret.” Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.) (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Spook Street

Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller
Winner of the 2018 CrimeFest Last Laugh Award
Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel 
An Irish Times Best Book of the Year
The Guardian Best Books of the Year
A Seattle Times Notable Book of the Year
​A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
Nominated for the Barry Award
Shortlisted for the British Book Award
Longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award

“Terrific spy novel . . . Sublime dialogue, frictionless plotting.”
—Ian Rankin

“Irony and black humor abound.”
—Newsday

“Spook Street is thoroughly gripping espionage, focused on intelligent plotting over action for its own sake—think le Carré, but with a heartier dash of dry humor.”
—The Seattle Times

“Stylistically, you can draw comparisons with the work of Raymond Chandler, though Herron keeps a tighter grasp on his narrative than Chandler ever did . . . 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.”
—The Spectator

“[Herron] is superb at evoking the le Carré-esque air of ennui, cynicism and self-loathing which permeates an intelligence service on its uppers, but which remains—the alternative being too awful to contemplate—duty bound to keep calm and carry on . . . Herron also leavens the mood with flashes of mordant humour, while the hilariously repellent Jackson Lamb—the anti-Smiley—is a constant source of politically incorrect one-liners.”
—The Irish Times

“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

“Sheer fun. Herron is spy fiction's great humorist, mixing absurd situations with sparklingly funny dialogue and elegant, witty prose.”
—The Times (UK)

“The lavishly loathsome Jackson Lamb oversees the action with all the finesse of a shark in a swimming pool.”
—Metro News (UK)

“Brilliant.”
—The Boston Globe

“Terrific . . . A heady mixture of deadpan humor, deft characterizations, and acute insight.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“All espionage aficionados are—or soon will be—reading Herron. But it’s high time, too, that readers of literary fiction embrace him in the way they have John le Carré.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

“Terrific . . . it’s a real pleasure to watch the super-smart if damaged Slough House agents rising to the occasion.”
—The Seattle Review of Books

“Snappy dialog, crafty twists . . . I've enjoyed each of the books in this series and always find them hard to put down.”
—A Fresh Fiction “Fresh Pick”

“Droll, fast-paced, and with a cast of crazy characters, you wouldn’t want to work at Slough House but you certainly want to read about it.”
—Bookgasm

“[Herron] does it all with a darkly deadpan humor that is as scathingly funny as it is irreverent. There’s no let up, no let down, it’s one hell of a tale told masterfully.”
—Open Letters Monthly

“Laced with black humor, this intense fourth in the series won the 2017 Steel Dagger Award.”
—Reviewing the Evidence

Praise for the Slough House novels
 
“[Herron's] cleverly plotted page-turners are driven by dialogue that bristles with one-liners. Much of the humor comes from Herron’s sharp eye for the way bureaucracies, whether corporate or clandestine, function and malfunction. The world of Slough House is closer to The Office than to 007.”
—The Associated Press

“The sharpest spy fiction since John le Carré.”
—NPR's Fresh Air

“Compulsively readable, tightly plotted.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[Herron is the] le Carré of the future . . . The characters are brilliant.”
—Patrick Neale on BBC’s The Oxford Book Club

“Heroic struggles, less-heroic failures and a shoot-out-cum-heist . . . with no let-up in the page turning throughout.”
—Esquire

“Herron’s strength is in examining at close hand the absurdities, conflicts, and dangers of the intelligence agency as an institution at the center of some of the most central conflicts in the 21st century.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“[Reads] like an episode of Spooks written by Ricky Gervais . . . With his poet’s eye for detail, his comic timing and relish for violence, Herron fills a gap that has been yawning ever since Len Deighton retired.”
—The Daily Telegraph, ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
 
“A superb thriller . . . Herron may be the most literate, and slyest, thriller writer in English today.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Library Journal

01/01/2017
"Slow horses" (failed spies) are back in the spotlight with a whirlwind descent into the perils of dementia when a deteriorating old spook starts leaking some of his work stories to local tradesmen. Alarmed, his grandson, River Cartwright, consults an office mate. Both of them are members of the despised Slough House unit where agents with "issues" are condemned to slow death by boredom. But not today! The old spook is a linchpin in an American agent's project to create an elite force of provocateurs. An overzealous member of this force freelances a terrorist incident. To keep things quiet, the granddad has to be eliminated. VERDICT In this fourth breathtaking installment (after Real Tigers) of this lively espionage series, Herron is never wrong-footed. Funny, biting, and devastating in his insights into the culture of espionage and antiterrorism, this supremely confident author devises characters and plots that in other hands would surely turn to mush.—Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171286569
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/21/2017
Series:	Slough House Series , #4
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,075,461

Read an Excerpt

Heat rises, as is commonly known, but not always without effort. In Slough House, its ascent is marked by a series of bangs and gurgles, an audible diary of a forced and painful passage through cranky piping, and if you could magic the plumbing out of the structure and view it as a free-standing exoskeleton, it would be all leaks and dribbles: an arthritic dinosaur, its joints angled awkwardly where fractures have messily healed; its limbs a mis-matched muddle; its extremities stained and rusting, and weakly pumping out warmth. And the boiler, the heart of this beast, wouldn’t so much beat as flutter in a trip-hop rhythm, its occasional bursts of enthusiasm producing explosions of heat in unlikely places; its irregular palpitations a result of pockets of air straining for escape. From doors away you can hear its knocking, this antiquated heating system, and it sounds like a monkey-wrench tapping on an iron railing; like a coded message transmitted from one locked cell to another.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Spook Street"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Mick Herron.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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