Nobody Walks (Soho Crime)

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Starred Review. Herron's remarkable novel has enough suspense, action, and deductive dazzlement to keep genre fans happy. But be warned: these are deep waters, and this is not nodding-off, night-table reading." - Booklist If you haven't read Nobody Walks and you love the Slough House books then make a point of reading it. Both Ingrid Tearney and JK Coe feature. JK Coes first appears in The List, and then in this, before finally appearing as one of the slow horses in Real Tigers. In this book, readers discover what happened to JK Coe prior to becoming a slow horse and why he is a little, ahem, jumpy. Ingrid Tearney is at her manipulative and conniving best. I never did warm to the people, but I did find it intriguing discovering the connections between them. There’s a gaming mogul, for whom his son worked, and some kind of criminal network that he wonders if his son was connected to. We see a couple of those crims discussing a bigger network. Tearney] resembled the more benevolent kind of witch, the type to dish out helpful potions when love let you down. At the start of this beautifully written and ingeniously plotted standalone from Herron (Nobody Walks), 26-year-old mail room employee Maggie Barnes is trying hard not to get caught late one Continue reading »

Nobody Walks by Mick Herron | Goodreads

By eight the first swell of workers had flooded the city and the second was gathering force. The underground, arteries hardening, was a wheezing queue of trains in the which passengers, squeezed into awkward shapes, counted down the stations of the cross.”The suspicious death of his son brings an undercover spook for MI-5’s Special Ops out of retirement with a vengeance. Undercover, after all, was what Bettany did when his own life failed him. Undercover meant dropping out of sight, leading somebody else's life in a succession of foreign cities. It meant leaving everything behind. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Bettany and Liam had been estranged when Liam died and Bettany always thought he'd have time to make things work again with his son. He realizes now that time's up. Liam is dead and there are no second chances. The only person who seems to have known Liam is a woman named Flea who worked with him in a gaming business called 'The Lunchbox'. Liam was hired because he was the first person to ever break the game's code. Herron has frequently been compared to le Carré, but I’ve often felt that that was just lazy thinking because although they’re both fine writers and take espionage as their subject, the style and approach of the Slough House novels is very different from le Carré. Here, Herron produces a thoughtful, serious and penetrating character study of Bettany which is more reminiscent of le Carré. Herron also builds a fine, tense plot peopled with well drawn characters and which refuses to give easy, neat answers.

Nobody Walks by Mick Herron | Hachette UK Nobody Walks by Mick Herron | Hachette UK

You can find a recent podcast on Irish Times with Herron when he released Joe Country, one of the Slough House series, a favorite of mine.I enjoyed Nobody Walks. It’s not in the stellar class of most of the Slough House series, but it’s a very good thriller which fleshes out some familiar characters – most notably Dame Ingrid Tearney and J.K. Coe. Bettany is a retired secret ops agent who worked for M15, Britain's secret service. Ingrid Tearney, the director of M15, knows that Bettany is in town and she has an agenda of her own. She sics a psychiatric newby on Bettany who gives him Marten Saars' name. Additionally, the gaming company that Liam worked for is run by a very eccentric man named Vincent Driscoll. Coe delivers the message that Ingrid wants Liam to keep his hands off of him. Bettany wonders why. In the meantime, he buys a gun. He’d spent the better part of a decade taking [X X] off the board only to find that others had filled the gap. The world might technically be a safer place, but you’d need pretty sophisticated measuring equipment to be sure.” If you like your suspense novels told with a smart dash of wit and sarcasm, filled with lots of twists and turns, Herron’s your man.” A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.

Mick Herron’s Slough House series The complete guide to Mick Herron’s Slough House series

Thoughts became rituals in themselves. You plodded the same course over and over, like any dumb beast or wind-up toy. Tom, though, had been ex-Service before he severed all ties and, at his son’s flat, something sets off an alarm bell for him. He is soon convinced that Liam was murdered, and is determined to find out who is responsible. But his questions are upsetting quite a few people, and equipping himself with the necessary announces his return the crime bosses whose long incarceration he effected during his “joe” days. It’s a bit grim, but a good read, and there are even a few passing references to some Slough House characters, which is fun for fans like me. I read Nobody Walks in one afternoon. It was dark, funny and totally unputdownable. There were even links to Slough House which was great. I enjoyed the writing which is always to the point, the humour which is often very British and the characters. We hardly meet Flea but she is delightful. Tom Bettany is one of those main characters you could make a series about. And as for Dame Ingrid Tearney - well...… Then someone on high at Regent’s Park sends young J.K. Coe (unofficially) with a message: a “do not disturb” on one name, an implication of responsibility for another. The source alone flags the information with a high index of suspicion, so Bettany sets out to verify, while ensuring to stay under the radar of the various parties eager to get up close and physical with him.Nobody Walksis a very different kind of thriller: more Richard Stark than John Le Carre. It’s stripped downand raw; a satisfying, immersive thriller, bold and brutal in its simplicity.” Bettany) let Flea lead him upstairs, where the windows were untinted, and the view was of rooftops across the canal. What had once been factories were now flats, though retained the outward appearance of industry. But an industry tamed, its corners waxed and polished.

Nobody Walks by Mick Herron | Waterstones Nobody Walks by Mick Herron | Waterstones

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. The explanation of young Liam's death makes little sense to Tom, who begins to make enquiries of his own. Suspicion lands on Vincent Driscoll, Liam's rather odd games-designer boss, and this raises a red flag for MI5. With Driscoll having recently been vetted for national honours, Dame Ingrid Tearney wants to deal with the situation very discreetly, so she enlists JK Coe, a still wet-behind-the-ears officer from Psych Eval, to act as go-between. Tearney and Bettany are a match for each other, but only one of them knows what's really going on.But the McGarry clan wasn't the only party interested in Bettany's return to the UK. The Head of MI5, Dame Ingrid Tearney, and another recurring MI5 staffer also popped up. Tearney has been mentioned in the Slough House novels but usually from the perspective of her envious subordinate Diana Taverner. This was the first glimpse into her head and it was in keeping with somebody as the leader of a spook agency. In Herron’s terrific, and terrifically funny, fourth Slough House novel (after 2016’s Real Tigers), London’s intelligence teams are on full alert after a suicide bomber kills dozens in a Continue reading » This is good business, . . . The Circle, they’re Google. They’re Apple. You don’t want to go head to head with them. You want to stand shoulder to shoulder.’” Herron’s remarkable novel has enough suspense, action, and deductive dazzlement to keep genre fans happy. But be warned: these are deep waters, and this is not nodding-off, night-table reading.” Once upon a time, Bettany had gone undercover to put the McGarry Brothers in jail for their contribution to The Troubles. Although he had given his testimony behind a screen, there were many in the McGarry clan who would be quite pleased to get their hands on Bettany for betraying them. Only the death of his son was powerful enough motivation to return to the UK.