Mick Herron

"London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one: Cover your arse. At MI5 headquarters Regent's Park, First Desk Claude Whelan is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions himself: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number Ten; from the showboat's wife, a tabloid columnist, who's crucifying Whelan in...

London's Slough House is where disgraced MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their washed-up careers. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle--not unusual in this line of work. But they have one thing in common: they all want to be back in the action. And they'll do anything to...

"Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in the huge city of London, with no family but an estranged sister, no boyfriend or partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice. Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to infiltrate the establishment and thwart an international...

"In London's MI5 headquarters a scandal is brewing that could disgrace the entire intelligence community. The Downing Street superforecaster-a specialist who advises the Prime Minister's office on how policy is likely to be received by the electorate-has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, who was once head of MI5, has been tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads him straight back to Regent's Park itself, with First Desk Diana Taverner...

"At Slough House-MI5's London depository for demoted spies-Brexit has taken a toll. The "slow horses" have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House wiped from Service records-and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets? With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's...

"Dieter Hess, an aged spy, is dead, and John Bachelor, his MI5 handler, is in deep, deep trouble. Death has revealed that the deceased had been keeping a secret second bank account--and there's only ever one reason a spy has a secret second bank account. The question of whether he was a double agent must be resolved, and its answer may undo an entire career's worth of spy secrets." --

A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information.
It’s also what happens just before you hit the ground.
 
Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, and when Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone café, he knows he’s witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions...

"Espionage. Subterfuge. Blackmail. Mystery. Humor. Revenge. Failure. Success. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, author of the Slough House novels, the books that inspired Slow Horses from Apple TV+. For fans new and old, Standing by the Wall is both an excellent introduction to the extended literary universe of Mick Herron and an immersive expansion of said universe. Meet more bad spies and even worse detectives....

In this chillingly plausible thriller, CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron proves he “never tells a suspense story in the expected way” (The New York Times Book Review).
When a highly classified espionage operation breaks down, a prisoner escapes from a transport vehicle on the busy ring road outside Oxford. Now an armed and desperate man is on the loose. He has taken refuge in a preschool, where a collection of teachers,...

The road to hell is paved with all sorts of intentions, as Oxford private investigator Zoë Boehm discovers when a straightforward jewelry store robbery turns out to be anything but.

When Zoë Boehm agrees to track down the gang who knocked over Sweeney’s jewelry shop, she’s just hoping to break even in time for tax season. She certainly doesn’t expect to wind up in a coffin. But she’s about to become...