The Secret Hours by Mick Herron

 

Rating 5⭐s

398 pages

You can buy The Secret Hours...Here

You can find out more about the author...Here

• The Blurb...

Trying to investigate the Secret Service is like trying to get rid of the stink of dead badger. Hard.
For two years the government's Monochrome inquiry has produced nothing more than a series of dead ends.
The Service has kept what happened in the newly reunified Berlin under wraps for decades, and intends for it to stay that way.
But then the OTIS file turns up.
What classified secrets does it hold? And what damage will it create?
All Max Janácek knows is that someone is chasing him through the pitch-dark country lanes and they want him gone.

WE ALL HAVE JOBS TO DO IN THE DAYLIGHT. IT'S WHAT YOU DO IN THE SECRET HOURS THAT REVEALS WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

• Our Review...

Regular visitors to our little site will know Mick Herron is just about our favourite author. Once again he delivers an absolute peach. There are numerous finer points to hit while writing a novel. Plot, character, pacing, delivering the twist, descriptive writing, emotive writing. Some authors are very good at hitting one of these sweet spots and the result is a good book. Although it's very subjective Mick Herron seems to hit them all, in parallel throughout the story, and through every novel. The result is just joyous, effortless reading.

This novel is described as a lean-to novel ie it can be read as a standalone but you get so much more out of it if you are at least familiar with some of the characters from the excellent Slow Horses series. 

The plot is dual timeline. in the present a Government committee is tasked with finding wrong doing by the secret services.  The aim being to find some dirt and so to usher privatisation of certain aspects of national security. However Regents Park (MI5 HQ) isn't playing ball and are not offering up security files. However one file mysteriously falls into their lap. The Otis file from 1990s Berlin and this is where we split into our second timeline. We are introduced to an ensemble of characters, some new, some are clearly referenced in the Slow Horses series. While some of the Slow Horses characters can be spotted immediately, despite having different "working" names, some however emerge gradually.. Who released the file to the inquiry? what was the plan? why is an elderly man in the Devon countryside being hunted?

We come for the plot but stay for the characters. Its difficult to talk about the characters without giving away their alter egos but they are all wonderfully defined. All very real but very vibrant, they stop just at the very spot where they could over develop into caricature. From the 1994 plot the reader can see their origins, how 1994 affects how they developed, think and act in the 2020s. How they became trapped into their personalities. All becomes clear at the final denouement, who the bad guys are, how MI5 work around the restraints of potential privatisation, why Jackson Lamb trusts no-one and why he is un-sackable.

Whenever I read Mick Herron's descriptive prose it sets me in mind of Dickens when he describes the carriage journey over the moors in a tale of two cities. You can feel the not just the environment but also the mood of a venue or situation.

All in all a wonderful addition to a wonderful cannon. One of my biggest regrets in reading is that I didn't read the Slow Horses novels in order (not that it adversely affects my enjoyment of them). Take a tip from me read them in order, and start soon. I honestly think he is better at Spy novels than Fleming, LeCarre, Deighton et al

• Selected Quotes..

So sitting tight and calling the cavalry wasn’t an option, and wouldn’t necessarily have been a sensible move anyway. Sometimes, it was the cavalry you had to watch out for.

its garden wall, as tall as Max himself, was an ancient thing of overgrown rocks, held together by crumbling mortar and ambitious moss.

Always decide who’s to blame before anything goes wrong. It makes the subsequent investigation much simpler.

Unheard objections were like unacknowledged offspring: if no one knows about them, could they really be said to exist?

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• About The Author...

Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and – despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor – found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron’s Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

 

In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of “the twenty greatest spy novels of all time”.

 The Slough House thrillers have won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, two CWA Daggers, been published in twenty-five languages. He is also the author of the Zoë Boehm series, soon to be adapted into a major TV series starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed standalone novels Nobody Walks and The Secret Hours.