Review of Mick Herron's Nobody Walks

Nobody Walks, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime, February 17, 2015)

After a long career as an ops agent for MI-5, Tom Bettany had had enough. He'd gone undercover for years to bust the McGarry crime organization, and that experience was a stain on the soul. When his wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he quit to be with her and their son, Liam. After Hannah died, the estrangement from Liam that had begun during his undercover years turned to a complete split.

Bettany became a bit of a drifter, leaving England for France and taking strenuous physical jobs, like his latest one in a meat packing plant. When he gets a call saying that Liam died from a fall from his apartment balcony, where he had been smoking a powerful new strain of marijuana called muskrat, Bettany comes home. Not just to go to the funeral, but to find out exactly what happened.

It doesn't take much of his old intelligence skills for Bettany to figure out that Liam's death was no accident. Now he needs to find out who is responsible and make them pay. With no official sanction and a fierce thirst for revenge, though, Bettany's methods of investigation lack a certain subtlety. In short order, he has problems with a whole raft of dangerous characters, including the muskrat distribution gang's kingpin, McGarry gang members, and the muscle for Liam's boss, who is a multi-millionaire video game creator. And when Bettany gets a call from MI-5, that's not good news, either.

I got to know Herron's writing in the last couple of years, when I read his Slow Horses and Dead Lions. The books are about a group of MI-5 agents who have been exiled from Regent's Park, where the real intelligence action is, to Slough House because of various screwups and misdeeds. These castoff agents are expected to resign at the sheer humiliation, but they're determined to hang on, distinguish themselves somehow and scrape their way back across the Thames.

The Slough House series books are terrific thrillers, stylishly written and with plenty of cynical humor. One running schtick is how the Slough House boss, the slovenly and casually offensive Jackson Lamb, is able to puncture the two top iron ladies at Regent's Park, Ingrid Tearney and Diana Tavener.

Mick Herron

You definitely don't have to read the Slough House books to enjoy Nobody Walks. It stands on its own and has a different style. There is not much humor to be had in Tom Bettany's story. This is a grim and gritty revenge thriller. You can't call Bettany likable, but he's a riveting character and the story is both action-packed and thought-provoking, with plenty of twists and turns. If this book were made into a movie––which would be a great idea––I could see Daniel Craig or Liam Neeson playing Bettany.

If you have read the Slough House books, I think you'll get a kick out of seeing the iron ladies, and you may wonder, as I do, whether Nobody Walks is the end of the Bettany story or if there will be a sequel. And if there is a sequel, might the Slough House gang come along for the ride?

Notes: I was given a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Seven

It's odd how the publishing world works sometimes. I've complained before about the long waits for UK books to be published in the US, and those delays for Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series books are particularly lengthy. But, for some reason, his books are often available on audio in the US quite awhile before they are published in hardcover or e-book form. And that's why I recently listened to the latest, Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart (Bantam, December 2) before it was available here in other formats.

The PCU has now moved from its previous rundown quarters to new (to them) rundown quarters within the City of London, that square mile within the huge metropolis, where the original Roman settlement was and that constituted the entire city for hundreds of years. The City has its own police authority, and the PCU is now part of it, rather than London's Metropolitan Police. The good news is that their longtime nemesis boss, the saturnine Oscar Kasavian, is now out of the picture. The bad news is that while the new boss, Orion Banks, is younger, female and easier on the eyes, she has just as much impatience with the PCU's methods.

Banks thinks the remit for policing the City is the huge financial crimes that happen every day, not the kind of oddities that the PCU normally handles. This time around, it's the suicide's buried corpse that a couple of stargazing teens see climb out of his coffin, lurch around and utter what sounds like "Ursa Minor." Then there's the hit-and-run killing of one of the teen witnesses and, just because these things always come in threes, the disappearance of the ravens from the Tower of London; the ravens whose presence is said to protect the crown from falling.

The book is as delightful as this series always is. Maybe the ancient and slovenly curmudgeon Arthur Bryant isn't quite as loony as usual, but the tradeoff is that we find out a bit more than we knew about his past. Although the book is filled with the characters that regular readers will love to revisit, this is one of those series titles that can be enjoyed almost as much by someone who hasn't read the PCU books before.

If you like the macabre, there's plenty more after you finish the PCU's necromancy.

Jonas Karlsson's The Room (translated from the Swedish by Darcy Hurford; Random House, February 17) is a short novel, but reviewers are saying it's long on entertainment value. Our narrator is Bjorn, an office drone among many others, in a company called The Authority. Bjorn has a wildly inflated view of his own superiority and has plenty of things to say on these pages about the shortcomings of his co-workers.

One day, Bjorn comes across the perfect office space. Everything about the way it is furnished is optimal, and it even includes a mirror that reflects the best face of Bjorn. In this office, he is supremely productive; his best self. So why is it empty? He shows it to his office colleagues and insists they cram in there for meetings. But the others tell him there is no office there. They are creeped out by watching Bjorn sit in an empty space, staring off and telling them he's actually working in that perfect office.
Who is right? We already know Bjorn is an unreliable narrator, so is he imagining this office, or are his colleagues such ground-down drones that they can't see what is right in front of them? Some readers are calling this a masterpiece, both funny and creepy.

The creep factor is extremely high in Phil Hogan's A Pleasure and a Calling (Picador, January 6). I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of the book last week and I had to revise my list of top reads of 2014 pronto. And I don't normally much like the creepy stuff.

William Heming owns a real estate firm in a leafy and prosperous village within commuting distance of London. He started there as a young apprentice and, over the years, he's been inside a large proportion of the houses in the village. Here's the thing, though. The last time he was inside many of those houses was long after they were sold and the new owners had moved in. You see, Heming always cuts a copy of the house key when he's showing a house, and very few buyers change the locks after they move in. It's almost like they're giving him permission to come in.

Heming likes his village and he likes things to be just so. To do that, access is sometimes important. For example, if a neighbor refuses to clean up after his dog, that neighbor may need to learn a lesson by having the dog's mess transferred to the nice white carpet in his living room. To anticipate what might need to be done, monitoring is a good idea, too, isn't it? Heming pays close attention and learns what people's schedules are and when their houses are unoccupied. He likes to get in there and just see what the residents are all about––and maybe collect a souvenir or two. Nothing expensive, really; just a token memento for his collection.

When Heming finds himself powerfully attracted to a young librarian, Abigail, who he learns is having a love affair with a married man whom Heming knows is a cad, well, it's his duty to do something about it. And things become very complicated, very fast.

This book has tension and atmosphere by the bucketload, and some guilty laughs as well. The next time I look in a lighted window as I'm going down the street, or I wish I could exact some lone justice on an inconsiderate driver, I'll think of Mr. Heming. But what, exactly, will I be thinking?

There is nobody like Alfred Hitchcock for atmosphere, so when a book comes along that promises to be Hitchcockian, that's one I want to check out. In The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Hardcover, January 13) by Paula Hawkins, Rachel is a woman well into a downward spiral. The drinking started when she was unable to conceive and her husband left her. It accelerated when he remarried and had a baby with his new wife. Now a blackout-level drunk, she's lost her job.

Rachel doesn't want to admit she's been fired to her flatmate, so she continues to commute on the train. She begins to fantasize about a young couple she sees having breakfast on their roof deck every day. They seem so happy; they have the life she was meant to have and they live so close to where her ex-husband now lives. But one day, Rachel sees the female half of the couple in what appears to be a passionate embrace with another man.

The female half of the couple later disappears and Rachel decides to play amateur sleuth. It's not like she has much else to do. But when the police become involved and Rachel is entangled, her blackouts and her imagination will make her a person of interest. Rachel is another unreliable narrator whose story (and a grain of salt) I want to take on soon.

How about some thrills along with the chills? I'm a big fan of Mick Herron's Slough House series (Slow Horses and Dead Lions), but Nobody Walks (Soho Crime, February 17) is a standalone. Herron paints strong characters with a few strokes, adds layers of sarcasm with a knife and finishes off his canvas with sprays of violent action.

Herron's latest protagonist is Tom Bettany, former Special Ops agent with MI-5. Tom retreated to a life of mind-numbing toil in France after his wife died, but now he's brought back to London because of the death of his son, Liam. The story is that Liam was out on his narrow balcony smoking a joint of powerful "Muskrat" when he fell to his death. Tom wants to know who sold Liam the Muskrat and how it is he was smoking it when there's no sign of a match or a lighter in Liam's flat.

Reappearing in London and asking questions soon makes Tom a target from several quarters, including a gangland captain, some crooks he put away in the past and the new chief of Tom's old MI-5 unit. Will one of his pursuers get to Tom before he finds out who's responsible for Liam's death and wreaks his revenge?

If you liked Ted Lewis's Get Carter (originally titled Jack's Return Home) or the movie starring Michael Caine, I'm thinking Nobody Walks will be right up your dark and menacing street.

One of the all-time great espionage thrillers is James Grady's Six Days of the Condor (which was made into the terrific Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway). Forty years have passed since that book, so I was very pleasantly surprised to hear that Grady has written a sequel, titled The Last Days of the Condor (Forge, February 17).

Blowing the whistle on the CIA and then going on the run, as the Condor did back then, takes its toll on a guy over all those years. Condor, also called Vin in this book, has had a heart attack and is on some heavy-duty drugs for PTSD. When a federal agent who is supposed to be his minder is found killed at Condor's place, Condor goes on the run again, pursued by a killer called Monkey Man and a whole menagerie of others who want him dead.

Who to trust and who to kill, as Condor takes to the streets of DC? Kirkus Reviews says the "prolonged action scenes are terrific, and the bounding energy of [Grady's] writing carries you along the rest of the time." There is also a rumor that the book has already been optioned for a movie. I wonder if Robert Redford will return as the Condor?

We can't let the men have all the thriller action, so how about a couple of female protagonists getting in on the fun?

Sarie Holland is a college honors student who gets into a big jam in Duane Swierczynski's Canary (Mulholland, February 24). Sarie makes the mistake of doing a favor for her boyfriend and gets busted by the narco squad. She refuses to roll on her boyfriend, but to avoid prosecution, she agrees to become a CI, a confidential informant, passing on information about the drug dealers she knows to her police contact, Ben Wildey.

Sarie's a smart cookie and such a good CI that the ambitious Wildey presses her to get further inside and provide information about the more dangerous higher-ups in the business. That backfires in a big way, leaving Sarie targeted by the gang and the bent cops who work with them. But they didn't bargain for someone as clever as Sarie, someone who is sick and tired of being used and wants to get her own back.

Rebecca Scherm's Unbecoming (Viking Adult, January 22) seems like a perfect title for a book about a young woman, Grace, who is constantly shedding her old self to regenerate into someone different. But the new persona always seems to be what somebody else wants her to be, not who she really is––because that person, she feels, has never been good enough.

At the moment, Grace from Tennessee is now Julie from California, living in Paris and working as an art restorer for a sketchy little company. She monitors her old hometown paper on the internet, though, to keep tabs on Riley and his best friend, Alls. Grace had masterminded a heist scheme that would get the three enough money to leave little Garland, Tennessee way back in their rearview mirror. But while Grace made it overseas with a rolled-up painting canvas from the stately home they robbed, Riley and Alls were caught and sent to prison. They could be paroled soon and Grace wonders if they'll be coming for her.

Flashbacks take the reader to that previous life in Garland, when Grace felt the lack of her parents' love, then the welcoming warmth of Riley's family. She wanted to be what Riley and his family thought she was, but she could only be that girl on the surface. She always wanted something more, something different.

Early readers are saying that Grace is a thoroughly unlikeable but intriguing character. The marketing types are comparing the book to works by everybody from Patricia Highsmith to Donna Tartt and Gillian Flynn. I get that the protagonist is amoral, like Highsmith's Tom Ripley, and a manipulative conniver, like Flynn's Amy Dunne, but I hope there's more to the Donna Tartt comparison than a rolled-up stolen canvas. What I really hope is that there's only the most superficial truth to all of these comparisons, and that Rebecca Scherm has written a story all her own.

Review of Mick Herron's Dead Lions

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Let's say a telephone line worker is out working in the phone company truck one day when he realizes he forgot his lunch at home. So he drives home in the truck to get his lunch, and on the way back he blows through a stop sign and hits a car. Now let's say, instead, that the worker decides to ignore that boring packed lunch and drives over to the Bada Bing for a lunch of beer, chicken wings and live entertainment. On the way back to the job, he blows through a stop sign and hits a car.

Is the phone company liable for the worker's car accident? Well, this is where the delightfully-named "frolic and detour" principles of the law kick in. The first scenario is a mere detour, which means that the worker was still sufficiently on the job to make the phone company liable for his accident. But the second scenario is a frolic (in more ways than one), and the phone company isn't liable.

Now let's say the employer isn't the phone company, but Britain's MI5 intelligence service, the line worker is an entire small office building's worth of castoff agents gone rogue, and the damage ranges from severe embarrassment to kneecapping to gory death. In other words, not just a detour or even a frolic, but some whole new legal concept, like maybe ruckus, binge, spree, rampage, rumble or wingding. Though maybe being British, they'd go for understatement and call it something like a perturbation.

Whatever you call it, and whatever the legal consequences, what we have in Mick Herron's Dead Lions is decidedly not just another day on the job. At MI5, if you screw up in a big way––like become a blackout drunk or punch out another agent in the lunchroom or let highly confidential material fall into the hands of the press––then you end up being moved from Regent's Park to Slough House. At Slough House, the "Slow Horses" are given endless, dull paperwork, in hopes they'll give up and resign.

In case the humiliation of becoming a Slow Horse, and the tedium of the work aren't enough encouragement to quit, Slough House boss Jackson Lamb turns up the discomfort level with a constant stream of insults, demeaning assignments (like picking up his takeout orders) and crude gross-outs, like aiming his deadly flatulence directly at his charges.

The current denizens of Slough House are made of sterner stuff, though, and won't be pushed into resigning. Or maybe it's just that they're too stubborn or stupid to realize the movers will never be taking them back to Regent's Park.

As the story begins, an old street agent named Dickie Bow is found dead on a bus near Oxford. Lamb figures out that is murder and that it's connected with a Cold War Russian spy named Alexander Popov––who may be real or may be a fiction created by MI5 back in the day. Nobody at Regent's Park would want to be bothered with this, Lamb thinks. They're far too busy spying and conducting disinformation campaigns on each other; probably not all that interested in some washed-up low-level stringer agent from a war they've all but forgotten. Lamb harnesses all the Slow Horses to work on the case; all, that is, except for the two who get a call from the Park to provide protection to a visiting Russian oil baron, Arkady Pushkin, while he's in London for some high-profile meetings and possible recruitment by the Park.

Did you notice that Alexander Popov and Arkady Pashkin have the same initials? One of the Slow Horses, Catherine Standish, does, and that worries her. At first, Lamb is dismissive: "Give me a break. I've got the same initials as . . . Jesus Lhrist, but I don't go on about it. This isn't an Agatha Christie." You'd better believe it isn't an Agatha Christie, and Lamb's crudity isn't the half of it. As Catherine's suspicions ferment, the plot bubbles with sleeper spies, Russian gangsters, riot in the streets, guns, explosions and mayhem in London's newest, loftiest skyscraper.

It can be a little difficult at times to keep all the Slow Horses straight, and the plot loses a bit of steam in the middle, but get past this and enjoy Herron's writing. It's full of style and cynical humor, and the last third has all the punch-your-lights-out action of a movie thriller––though the Slow Horses' nonexistent budget means that chases are on foot or bicycle, and the weaponry is in short supply.

Dead Lions will be published on May 7, 2013 by Soho Crime. There is plenty of time before then to read Slow Horses, Herron's introduction to the Slough House crew, which was a finalist for the Crime Writers Association Steel Dagger Award in 2010. And maybe I'll also read his Zoë Boehm series: Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die and Smoke & Whispers.

Dead Lions reminded me of just how effective and dangerous––not to mention entertaining––intelligence agency castoffs can be. If that piques your interest, you might try Bob Cook's Disorderly Elements, featuring the mole-hunting exploits of Michael Wyman, laid off from MI6 with no pension and a baby on the way; or Paper Chase, a wicked caper about four retired agents who decide to get back at the current crop of MI6 whippersnappers who have the bad manners to issue them written orders not to write any memoirs of their intelligence service.

Or how about Brian Garfield's Hopscotch, in which a 25-year CIA agent is booted out and, missing the thrills of the job, decides to threaten to expose all he knows about the Cold War powers' secrets, for the pure adrenaline-pumping pleasure of getting them all to chase after him? The film adaptation of the book is a hoot, too, and features the perversely charismatic pairing of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. For sheer, giddy detour, frolic, hubbub and cartoonishly violent uproar involving former agents, it's hard to beat the movie RED, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Mary-Louise Parker.


Note: I received a publisher's review copy of Dead Lions. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my user names there.