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    Spook Street
    Spook Street
    Spook Street
    Audiobook10 hours

    Spook Street

    Written by Mick Herron

    Narrated by Gerard Doyle

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for aging spies who can no longer remember their secrets are secret? Or are senile spies taken care of in a different, more permanent fashion?

    These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sliding into dementia, and questions his grandson, River, must answer now that the spy who raised him sometimes forgets
    to wear pants. But River, himself an agent at Slough House, MI5’s outpost for disgraced spies, has other things to worry about. A bomb has detonated in the middle of a busy shopping center and killed forty innocent civilians. The “Slow
    Horses” of Slough House must figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 21, 2017
    ISBN9781501946691
    Spook Street

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    Reviews for Spook Street

    4.5/5

    198 ratings16 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Simply excellent. Great characters, page-turning plot, evocative prose and a nice touch of dark humour (sometimes laugh out-loud humour). Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This one was more intriguing than the last two. There was also a little more character development and and focus on interpersonal relationships. I enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      I’m a sucker for British spy books, and this is a Great series. Spook Street is the best so far! Can’t wait to jump in to the next book in the series!
    • 5/5
      Another fantastic page turner, how I love this series and the characters. It does feel like a game of Russian roulette though with a main character dying in each book though.
    • 4/5
      Another enjoyable read about Slough House.
    • 4/5
      Long odd tale of David Cartwright and River. A bit slow, I think, but good.
    • 5/5
      The fourth volume in the 'Slough House' series didn't disappoint either. Actually, all employees are on the sidelines and yet it is they who make British intelligence look old.This time, too, an employee is the main character and yet everyone is involved. River Cartwright is found dead in his grandfather's bathroom. Jackson Lamb quickly realizes that the dead man is not River, but does not make a big announcement. River has since gone to France to find out why someone wants to kill their grandfather. In doing so, he discovers his own roots, which he doesn't like at all. Various killers are set on him. Patrice in particular makes life difficult for him and his colleagues from Slough House.As always, it was engaging from the first to the last page.
    • 4/5
      Herron is one of those authors where you can never really tell how far he'll push you as a reader. Already he's shown that he has no compunctions about killing off main characters so when he immediately (like right out of the gate) puts you on edge in this book you have no recourse but to grit your teeth and carry on with fingers crossed. Each volume of this series scrapes away at the pasts of each agent in Slough House (although its exalted leader Jackson Lamb still remains shrouded in darkness) and interestingly this one delves into the background of the O.B. (if you know you know). Spook Street felt ramped up in action from start to finish so I zipped through it lickety-split. Looking for dark humor, farts, and gritty detectives? Congrats, you've hit the jackpot! Herron is imminently readable so if you're looking for a quick mystery series I highly recommend this one (but start with Slow Horses or you will be L-O-S-T).
    • 3/5
      As a writer, you often wonder if it’s possible to tell a story using completely unlikeable characters. But then you grow up and realise no reader is interested in a story involving characters who repel them. Unless you’re Mick Herron. In this installment, a suicide bomber kills a bunch of teens in a shopping mall and then one of the Slough House agents is murdered, and the dead agent’s grandfather, the “Old Bastard”, an ex-MI5 bigwig, goes missing… and it’s all to do with a rogue CIA agent who set up a secret school in France to raise kids as terrorists and everyone is surprised when they turn out to be terrorists… The Slough House books do not score well on plausibility when it comes to their plots, but this one is even less believable than the ones preceding it. Herron seems keen to depict MI5 as a bunch of criminals – although he lavishes real contempt on Tory politicians – but his so-called heroes are all unlikeable incompetents. Sigh. The first book in the series is possibly worth a go, but the sequels are entirely missable.
    • 5/5
      This review is repeated for all the books in the Slough House series:
      Slow Horses
      Dead Lions
      The List
      Real Tigers
      Spook Street
      London Rules

      I’m on holiday in Australia and like all good holidays I came with a pile of books. Also like all good holidays, the books are pure escapism writing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish it, missing a page or two will not spoil the plot, not remembering a word of it the next day? well that marks it as a really good holiday read.

      I devoured this series, one every two days and loved every minute of them all. haven’t found the last one yet but ave got all the ones that came before including the novella, The List. You could pick any one of them up and read it and it wouldn’t matter if you hadn’t read the preceding ones, they all work individually but just like soup, steak and syrup pudding they work best in the right order.

      The setting is a dingy, run down building in a dingy, run down part of London. It is called Slough House and the people in there are referred to as Slow Horses. They are all members of the Secret Service who have fucked up one way or another and are no longer suitable for active service, but cannot be sacked without falling foul of the Employment Act, yes it even applies to spies.

      So they are banished to Slough House and given menial, mind numbing repetitive, pointless, soul destroying, work to do until they eventually give up and leave. Except, some of them don’t leave. Everyone pretty much knows exactly how everyone else fucked up big time to be in Slough House except for their boss, one Jackson Lamb, no-one knows how he ended up here or even suspects that he bargained his place here in exchange for doing a nasty job that was necessary at the time. He could best be described as cunning, nasty, abrasive, insulting, crude, ill-mannered and very politically incorrect, except that he spent the majority of his time in the service behind the wall working undercover in Soviet, Cold War territory, something that very few came back from alive.

      The books are a series of events that befall the occupants of Slough House. You soon get a feel for the characters and the James Bond meets Coronation Street situation. But them some of them die and some of them don’t. From book to book you never know who will be around at the end of the book. The characters of Jackson Lamb had me laughing out loud on many occasions, making me realise how seldom this happens!

      The real enemies are seen mainly to be those within the Secret Service and their political masters and the ends they will go to secure what they see as their rightful place in history. Right and Wrong are easily mistaken for each other and beyond a certain point it depends where you stand as to what you call which. The guns are seldom in the right hands and the good guys quite often don’t make it.

      The incidental characters are easily seen for the current political muppets they are based upon, a particularly evil Boris Johnson is never far from the plot. Also current events, Brexit and so on. In discussing the seemingly unbelievable factors in the current case it only takes Jackson Lamb to point out that Tony Blair is now a Peace Envoy for everyone to grasp that nothing can be dismissed as highly unlikely.

      If this ever gets turned into a Netflix series I will buy a television just to watch it!
    • 5/5
      Let me start by saying that having now read the first four books in the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, I think we can pretty well give up on any expectation that the plots are going to get any more realistic. That having been said, why read the books? Because the characters are, well, characters. Jackson Lamb himself, first of all. It’s taken me about a week to finish the first four books in this series, and I’m not saying it’s addictive, but … I will miss the misfits of Slough House while we wait for Mick Herron to write more books.
    • 4/5
      The story lags at the beginning but it picks up as the suspense builds after the first third of the book. By the end it becomes a fast-paced chase thriller.What is best about "Spook Street" is Jackson Lamb, the chief spook at Slough House and master of the slow horses. He holds the group together while being boorish and cynical about the Intelligence Establishment personified by the likes of Charles Whalen ("First Desk") and Diana Taverner ("Lady Di"). River Cartwright is a lead character who plays a ket role in the series up to now and probably into future books.It is possible to read this book as a standalone spy thriller, but all of the books in the series are worthwhile reading.
    • 4/5
      Thia is the fourth book in the Jackson Lamb series about failed spies in a quiet London office. This one was just as good as the other three I've read. The head of the office , Lamb, is still as foul and yet reliable as ever. River runs off to try and save the world. Catherine still wants a drink. Ho is still terrible at being a human being. These characters mixed with the aftwrmath of a terrible bombing and an increasingly confused elderly spy make for gripping reading. And also laughs.When the taxi dropped them, they walked to Baker Street. Patrice still had the gun, though where he’d secreted it, River couldn’t tell. If down the back of his waistband, as River suspected, he must have spent hours practising how to walk, sit, move, without looking like his haemorrhoids were flaring.
    • 5/5
      Mick Herron’s series of espionage novels featuring Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’ goes from strength to glorious strength. The ‘slow horses’ are intelligence officers who have been cast into ignominious exile in Slough House, the repository for the Security Service’s has-beens and failures. Jackson Lamb is himself a marvellous creation, resounding with an almost Dickensian monstrosity, eating, drinking, farting and swearing his way through the day, and never happier than when crushing one of his staff with unremitting and deliberately wounding rudeness. Jackson Lamb reminds me of Reginald Hill’s Superintendent Andy Dalziel, just without the Beau Brummell charm.Herron does not, however, rely solely upon the grotesqueness of Lamb’s character. His plots are well constructed, watertight and all too plausible. Spook Street opens with what appears to be a flash mob prank at a large shopping mall in West London which rapidly becomes a gruesome act of terrorism, with dozens of victims. In the wake of this outrage the Security Service, now under new management following the events of the previous novel, is stretched to the limit as is struggles to find any leads. Meanwhile David Cartwright, grandfather of River, one of Lamb’s ‘slow horses’, and formerly an eminence grise within MI5, is growing increasingly worried. Sometimes he is convinced that he is being watched, while at other moments he begins to doubt his own sanity. It is, therefore, perhaps unfortunate that he still has his old Service revolver close to hand.Each of the ‘slow horses’ has their own individual frailties and failings, often gleefully mocked by Lamb with the utmost disregard for their feelings. They do, however, complement each other, and over the last three novels have gelled together into a capable, if unorthodox, team. Meanwhile, their counterparts within the Service’s mainstream, housed at Regent Park, have more than enough of their own problems, particularly as they face additional scrutiny following the revelations in ‘Real Tigers’.Herron has the happy knack of combining gripping spy stories with colourful characters, strewn with moments of high comedy. All utterly entertaining.
    • 5/5
      River's grandfather is showing signs of dementia and appears to have shot and killed River, but (thankfully) it isn't quite that simple. Very much in the vein of the earlier instalments in this series, which I intend as a compliment, I was glad to see the return of Catherine and plenty of Lamb. I just skimmed a tiny bit of the chase scene at the end, but otherwise enjoyed every word.
    • 5/5
      5/5 on the Hoot-meterI tried, I really tried. The plan was to make it last. Read a few chapters, put it down, then repeat. Right…..I read it in a day because I was just having too much fun. When a new Mick Herron book comes out I will beg, borrow & steal to get my hands on it & this just might be the best of the bunch.The prologue yanks you into a typical mall somewhere in London. It’s full of busy shoppers & bored teens lounging around the fountain. Then the unspeakable happens. A man steps into the crowd & detonates his vest. In the horrific aftermath, MI5 is called in to investigate & calm the public but things really hit the fan when the bomber is identified.Meanwhile over at Slough House, River Cartwright worries about his grandfather. David Cartwright is a former spook who’s a legend in the spy world. But lately he seems a bit confused & doesn’t always recognize his grandson. He’s also dropping details about the old days that would best remain unsaid. What happens when a man full of state secrets begins to lose the plot? River has heard rumours about MI5 having an ”enhanced retirement package” for employees who become a problem & he’s determined to protect the man who raised him. That becomes a challenge when his next visit ends with a dead man in David’s bathroom.Eventually these 2 threads intersect in ways that have the bigwigs at Regent Park scrambling to save their own skin. They’ve elevated backstabbing to an art form in an environment where “The Art of War” is probably required reading.Book #4 of the “Slow Horses” series picks up in the aftermath of the last one & there have been some changes. Herron doesn’t hesitate to bump off establish characters so there are a few new faces at Slough House where MI5 agents labelled as screw-ups are sent to shift endless stacks of paper until they quit (or die, whichever comes first). But most of the original cast is back & they’re in fine form.IT genius Rodney Ho continues to live in an alternate universe where everyone likes him & chicks think he’s hot. Shirley Dander has surrendered to HR requests to deal with her volatile personality & is faithfully attending AFM (anger fucking management) classes. Marcus Longridge still has that pesky little gambling problem & is so bored he’s water boarding Shirley. Presiding over the crew is cold war relic Jackson Lamb. He’s never met someone he couldn’t offend & many would pay to see him gone but when you’ve been around a long time, you tend to know where the bodies are buried, literally. These stories are always a great mix of smart intricate mystery & dry black humour. It’s full of moments that make you gasp, frequently followed by inappropriate laughter. Herron is a keen observer of the human condition & his depiction of David Cartwright’s battle with dementia somehow manages to be both poignant & hilarious. Even in his screwed up fictional world, you’ll recognize more than a kernel of reality as he satirizes politicians, government bureaucracy & public perceptions. This one earns a spot on my “Top Ten” for 2016 (so far…) & I begin the long wait for book #5. If you’re a fan of Stuart MacBride or Jay Stringer, do yourself a favour & pick up “Slow Horses”.