From THE SECRET HOURS by Mick Herron

"There'll always be sock puppets, thinking they're messiahs, and there'll always be money men behind them."

 

Slow Horses

                    

My older son reminded me that I needed to read the Slough House series from the beginning. I downloaded the audiobook--which is excellent--but quickly realized I needed to see words on a page to fix the various names and places in my head.

So I alternated between listening and reading--and it worked well. There were subtleties I might have missed in either form but combining the two was completely delightful.

Wry, dry humor and an ensemble cast of interesting folks with a past, this is a kind of spy story new to me. A gang of discredited MI5 spooks are the slow horses, condemned to serve out their careers at Slough House, doing  busywork until they quit from frustration--or die.

But there's so much else going on--plots within plots and if you blink, you may miss something important. That's why the reading/listening approach worked so well for me.

I am looking forward to diving into the rest of the series. Plus, there's a television series, starring Gary Oldman, to look forward to.

There's an excellent, more comprehensive review   HERE.

Excellent Reading

I'd been seeing intriguing ads for The Vanishing Half and was thrilled to find it in the bag 0' books my local book pusher left me.

 Identical twins grow up in a rural Black community then run away together. Eventually one of them decides to 'pass' and leaves her twin. What happens next kept me reading till I finished (after midnight.) It's a page turner but NOT a soap opera--though the setup might suggest such. Instead, it's a profound look at racism in America, and in the Black community as well as others. It's an important, beautifully written novel. Highly recommended.

And then there's Spook Street. I thought I was tired of spy novels, but a very good friend insisted I read this. I'm glad I did. A retires intelligence agent is slipping into dementia. He knows where all the bodies are buried. So who was sent to eliminate him and whose is the body in the bath? Dry British humor at its best. Intelligent, cynical, and highly enjoyable. I'll be looking for the others in this series.