Nobody Walks: Mick Herron

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H]ere under Regent’s Park, some floors below the one at which she alighted now, various events had occurred in recent years which it was occasionally her duty to deny had ever taken place.

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? When he receives a message from MI5 that Driscoll is off limits his suspicions are immediately raised, but he also wonders if he is being manipulated. The Slough House related book Nobody Walks appeared after the short story The List and between the novels Dead Lions and Real Tigers in 201 5 .

Like a tethered goat, “Dame Spook” uses the gullible JK Coe of Psych Eval as her go-between and Bettany – signalling Coe’s eventual fate as a “Slow Horse”. The official story is that he fell off the balcony of his flat while smoking a particularly strong batch of weed. It also serves as a fine riposte to series like 'Spooks' which gives us noble heroes putting their lives on the line for the greater good - here we're grubbing in the dirt and there's nothing to separate the Service under Ingrid Tearney's maleficent and self-serving rule from the East End gangsters and Russian mafia hoods she's supposedly fighting against.

I never did warm to the people, but I did find it intriguing discovering the connections between them. Released again in the US and UK via Soho Press and it’s the final book released by them in the UK before John Murray took over. If you give up on this book, which some reviewers have suggested, you'll miss out on hauntingly beautiful prose, a stunningly crafted plot and the aching sadness of loss so subtly intertwined. This novel is well written, well-characterized and is literary fiction that happens to be a thriller.I'd gladly read more about Tom Bettany, but he may have burned all his London bridges by the end of this one. I loved his Slough House series, am currently enjoying his Oxford Investigations series and totally enjoyed this stand alone book. But there are too many details, blatant and hidden, in every sentence that if missed by the reader will lessen the impact of its ending. Dame Ingrid Tearney – Head of MI5 and someone with so many nefarious plans in the air she could join the circus as a juggler. Maybe it's the guilt he feels about losing touch with his son that's gnawing at him, or maybe he's actually put his finger on a labyrinthine plot, but either way he'll get to the bottom of the tragedy, no matter whose feathers he has to ruffle.

There’s a gaming mogul, for whom his son worked, and some kind of criminal network that he wonders if his son was connected to. Ingrid Tearney, the director of M15, knows that Bettany is in town and she has an agenda of her own.Bettany might have thought he'd left it all behind when he first skipped town, but nobody ever really walks away. Because it's relatively short, it seemed a lot more focused than some of the Slough House novels, and that sets it up amongst my favourites from Herron. For 21st century spies and politicians, I think the torch has been handed to Herron, who has run with it. Undercover meant dropping out of sight, leading somebody else's life in a succession of foreign cities. Set in the world of Herron's Slough House series, and not including Slough House in the tale, Nobody Walks gives me a look into Dame Ingrid Tearney (1st desk at MI5) and the spider webs she spins.