Rating: 5/5
Review:
Another cracker from Mick Herron
Joe Country is the sixth in Mick Herron’s Slough House series and
it’s well up to standard – meaning that it’s terrific.
A note for new
readers: do not start here. You need to read the previous books to
have any real idea of what is going on in Joe Country. (Be assured
that reading them will be an unalleviated pleasure.) For those of us
who know and love the series, this is an excellent instalment. The
plot involves several of the Slow Horses ending up on a potentially
deadly chase in snowbound Wales, more sneaky and convoluted chicanery
by Diana Taverner, the return of Frank Harkness among other threads,
while the characters we know (and sort-of love) develop – or at
least continue to be their well-drawn, entertaining selves.
Meanwhile, Jackson Lamb continues to be repellently wonderful and
often laugh-out-loud funny. He really is one of the great creations
of 21st-Century fiction and remains on excellent form here.
Herron manages to
combine humour with a genuinely exciting story from which, as always,
we really don’t know which characters will emerge alive. He writes
and structures it extremely well and I was hooked pretty well from
page 1. In short, this is a really good Slough House book; probably
no more really need be said. Very warmly recommended.
(My thanks to John
Murray for an ARC via NetGalley.)
No comments:
Post a Comment