The Marylebone Drop (Slough House Novella)

by Mick Herron

Overview

A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information.
It’s also what happens just before you hit the ground.
 
Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, and when Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone café, he knows he’s witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly for MI5, he sets in motion a train of events that will alter lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641290135
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Series:	Slough House Series
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	190,610
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Mick Herron is a British novelist and short-story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series, four Oxford mysteries, and three standalone novels. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.

Read an Excerpt

Seasoned Park watchers later said that the affair really began in Fischer’s, that beloved “café and konditorei” that bestows a touch of early twentieth-century Vienna on the foothills of twenty-first-century Marylebone High Street; its warm interior, its spring yellows and glazed browns, a welcome refuge from the winter-drizzled pavements. The more callow of their brethren preferred to believe that it started, as all things must, at Regent’s Park, but then the new generation had been trained to think itself at the constant heart of events, while the older knew that Spook Street, like Watling Street, runs backwards and forwards in time. The meeting at the Park might well have occurred earlier than the drop on Marylebone High, but that was a detail only, and when the time came for the whole business to be black-ribboned and consigned to the archive, nobody would care that a strip-lit office with functional furniture had been where the starting pistol was fired. No, once the facts were safely recorded, they’d print the legend instead. And legends thrive on local colour.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Marylebone Drop: A Novella"
by .
Copyright © 2018 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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Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mick Herron
​
“Compulsively readable, tightly plotted.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Mick Herron is the John le Carré of our generation.”
—Val McDermid

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

“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

“[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.” 
—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

“Brilliant.” 
—The Boston Globe

"Mick Herron is a master." 
—CrimeReads

From the Publisher