Will I love The Secret Hours?

While this is a stand alone contemporary spy novel, it plays with the past catching up and haunting us, and it provides us with visions and glimpses of characters we now know to be other people in other times.

The Secret Hours makes an excellent companion piece to the Slough House series with some of Herron's best characterization and plotting. I've been a massive fan of Mick Herron's slightly sideways and subversive spy novels since watching Slow Horses S1 and immediately binging the books available at the time. While not part of the main series, The Secret Hours tells its own compelling story of Cold War espionage and goes a long way towards fleshing out the backstories of some of the Slough House series' most fascinating and enigmatic characters.

Mick Herron, Britain's latest spy thriller writer phenomenon, is less patrician than Le Carre and more real world than Lee Child. He manages to put his finger on the irregular, failing pulse of the post Brexit decline and venality UK politics and affairs. News from a broken dysfunctional political system has rarely been so entertaining.,

Mick’s work and the world of the Slow Horses is surely no longer a secret now Apple TV have brought them to our screens. Over numerous novels, Mick has brought the gang in and out of focus, lifting the curtain to show us certain elements of their lives before pulling away, sometimes forever. I think the reason we keep coming back to these books, though, is to see what Slough House’s leader, Jackson Lamb, is doing. In this thrilling novel, Mick not only brings up to date, he also takes us back to the early-1990s in Berlin and provides a… show more.

I was reading Mick Herron's Slough House novels before Apple TV turned them into a great series (which I also love). I take it the Slough House novels are done - a couple of the leading characters have been killed off in the most recent novels, so unless Herron has a surprise in store... This novel is a kind of prequel.

It takes place in two times and places, one in Cold War Berlin, the other around the time that Slough House was being formed (before Jackson Lamb was called that, e.g.). I'm not sure whether this novel would be… show more.