Nobody Walks: Mick Herron

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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. I am a huge fan of the Slough House series and, having devoured the main books, went back to discover more by him – those books, like his novellas, which touch on the series, but move parallel to it or, like this title, flesh out some of the character’s back stories – in this case, that of J.

This is intense and emotionally powerful - and, as much as I love the Slough House books, this might just be my favourite Herron yet.

His wife had died of cancer a few years ago, so the death of his son is a powerful drawcard to bring Tom home to England. This novel is well written, well-characterized and is literary fiction that happens to be a thriller. What begins as a straightforward story of a man trying to discover who killed his son morphs into a suspenseful cat and mouse game. They were estranged for four years, Tom was out of the country, and a colleague of Liam’s rang to let him know. Undercover meant dropping out of sight, leading somebody else's life in a succession of foreign cities.

The Angel neighborhood is where the folks in the tech company are located and it’s apparently a very hip area of London off of the canal. I am constantly impressed by Herron’s ability to create this fictional world and make it realistic and dangerous. He might have thought he'd left it all behind when he first skipped town, but nobody really just walks away. What bothers Bettany is that he can't find any lighters or matches in Liam's apartment so he believes that someone must have been there with him, someone who lit the joint. Tom Beattany, a former MI5 undercover agent, has walked away from his former life after the death of his wife, but when he learns his son Liam has died in odd circumstances he’s drawn back in to the criminal underworld of London.Bettany had worked deep-cover, infiltrating the network of arms dealers, the Brothers McGarry, and from the outset he is suspicious of his son’s death: was it revenge because of him? My history with Mick Herron's books, and the fact that this one was published in 2015 during the Slough House series that I so love, led me to expect great things from this book. For fans of the Slough House series I would consider it essential for its introduction of Dame Ingrid and JK Coe.

Especially appreciated were the subtle clues to what is really going on dropped throughout the book. 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.

Tearney] resembled the more benevolent kind of witch, the type to dish out helpful potions when love let you down.