Ninth in the Slough House run, where MI5 parks the agents it can’t fire — bad spies serving out their careers shuffling paper under Jackson Lamb, who is filthy, cruel, and smarter than everybody. River Cartwright is off duty waiting to be cleared, so he pokes around his dead grandfather’s library and notices a book missing. That thread runs back to a covert operation during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the people who ran it are broke and old now and willing to talk. Diana Taverner, who runs the service, decides to get out ahead of it, and once she moves, people start dying. Herron writes the funniest dialogue in the genre and then breaks your heart with it.
Clown Town