Herron is not afraid to play with the rules of a genre and
this makes his work stand out, whether he is giving us a creepy psychological thriller
or an exuberant spy story. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The
Witness)
As a committed fan of Mick Herron’s brilliant, darkly comic
and politically incorrect Slow Horses
spy thriller series, I was keen to read his stand-alone psychological thriller.
It is very different – for a start, it has a much smaller cast – but it is also
very enjoyable.
Maggie Barnes is so ordinary that she is almost invisible in
a big city like London. She has a low-paid job in the post room of a big office
block. The only relationship she has ever had is over, and she has nothing in
common with her high-flying sister. So when a man approaches her in the cafe
where she regularly goes for her only treat – coffee and a cake – she is ripe
for the plucking.
He introduces himself as Harvey Wells, working for MI5, and
recruits her to do a bit of spying in her office block, which apparently houses
a sinister bunch of Chinese, out to conquer the world through an economic
takeover – a believable enough scenario for those who want to believe. But
things ratchet up when he asks her to insert spyware into a computer one night
– and the job goes badly wrong.
Harvey whisks Maggie off to an MI5 safe house – a dingy
basement. The reader works out, well before Maggie does, that all is not quite
what it seems about Harvey and his doings, but Maggie is not the kind of person
who is going to rock any boats. However, her sister Meredith begins to feel
guilty about Maggie and their estrangement, and realising her sister has
apparently vanished off the face of the earth, starts to search for her.
Meredith is brighter than Maggie and Harvey combined – not too hard – and
things begin to head towards a potentially nasty conclusion.
Herron’s writing often seems to have its tongue firmly in
its cheek, and this gives his books a sense of fun, even when things get dark
and violent. He is not afraid to play with the rules of a genre and this makes
his work stand out, whether he is giving us a creepy psychological thriller or
an exuberant spy story. - Margaret von Klemperer
John Murray Publishers Ltd; ISBN
978-1-47368-078-4
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