Mick Herron for Clown Town

'Mick Herron is our best and most topical spy writer' Ian Rankin

MI5's First Desk, Diana Taverner, doesn't appreciate threats.

So when those involved in a covert operation during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland threaten to expose the ugly side of state security, Taverner goes on the offensive. People get hurt.

Over at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, the slow horses are hard at work: belittling each other, pushing paper, and marking time. Their boss, Jackson Lamb, wants them at their desks, but the slow horses are always looking for a way back on to Spook Street.

Meanwhile, another slow horse, River Cartwright, is waiting to be passed fit for work. At a loose end, and with his grandfather – a legendary former spy – long dead, River investigates the secrets of the old man's library, and a mysteriously missing book. What stories will it hold, and who wants those stories to stay silent?

Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have been published in over twenty-five languages and are the basis of the award-winning TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Among his other novels are the Zoe Boehm series, also now adapted for TV starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, and the standalone novels The Secret Hours and Nobody Walks. Herron's awards include the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Gold, Steel and Diamond Daggers.

Image courtesy of Mikael Buck.