By Mick Herron, this was published in 2016, and is the third in the "Slough House" series (following along from Slow Horses, 2010; and Dead Lions, 2013). My audio-version was very effectively narrated by Sean Barrett.

Once again we're following the fortunes of a bunch of MI5 failures and embarrassments who have been exiled to Slough House and the irascible leadership of Jackson Lamb. This time the action is kicked off by the kidnapping of the second-most-senior in the "team", recovering alcoholic Catherine Standish.

As usual there's double-crossing and back-stabbing by the bucketload, so it takes a while to unearth quite what the motivation is behind the kidnapping, and who's pulling the strings. (There's a spoiler-free summary here.)

As we've come to expect from Herron, it's a fast-paced narrative, and I definitely wanted to find out what happened. I also continued to be invested in the characters. Some monumental snafu put each of them there, and once you've been handed over to Lamb's ungentle care, it sounds like the devil's own job to extract yourself again. They're all soldiering along with their own burden. Roderick Ho is terrible at any kind of relationship; River Cartwright is struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by his spook grandfather; Marcus Longridge is nostalgic for the adrenaline of his former role, and gambles as a substitute; Shirley Dander is lonely, and consoles herself with drugs; Louisa Guy is still grieving the partner who was wiped out in the previous book, and regularly engages in risky behaviour of various types. And Catherine Standish, though sober, enables us to understand that sobriety happens one day at a time.

Herron always has a specific contemporary issue that he wants to skewer. This time it's secret prisons, aka black sites. And into each book he drips bitter contempt about the way the UK's security services are run. So many people out for themselves and their ambitions, blithely waving away the bigger picture where real people get killed or permanently damaged...

Meanwhile, it's summer... Totally coincidentally. Summer, as it was in Bonjour Tristesse, and Stowaways. Summer in the sweltering city of London: "On a night hot as hell in the borough of Finsbury a door opens and a woman steps into the yard... Shops were still open, though banks and bookies and so on had darkened their doors. Pubs and bars had theirs propped open, letting heat escape on a tangle of music and voices. The canal wasn't far, and it was the kind of summer's evening when young people drifted that way, and shared picnics and wine on the benches, or unfolded blankets on grassy patches, where they could lie and text each other in drowsy comfort..."


Never stay in the city when it's summer... No good can come of it...

***

So far, so readable. But of the three I've read so far, this is the one that I enjoyed the least.

-- Lamb is just so obnoxious that I lost patience. And Ho becomes even more of a stereotype, taunted and bullied by his colleagues in a way that was painful to listen to.

-- The convolutions felt a little too much... As this blogger writes: "All of the machinations in the previous books in the series feel like a trip to kindergarten compared to the wheels within wheels occurring [in this one]..." He means this as a compliment, but to me it's something of a demerit.

-- The cynicism felt a little too much, too, however heartily I agree with what it expresses.

-- There's also quite a bit more biffo than I remember in the previous iterations. I always feel less is more in this area.

The running theme here, obviously, is "too much"... The previous two I took on board without flinching, whereas this one sat in my readerly stomach like an injudicious helping of greasy food.

Once again, though, I'm swimming against the tide... For others, it's "another cracker... another dazzling effort"; "the best Herron novel yet"; "as fresh as if it was the first".

Still, I stick with my point. I can't say I'm through with Slough House, but I definitely need a bit of a break...