Spook Street - Mick Herron
Whose turn is it this time? You can always be sure that one of Jackson Lamb's team of bottom of the rung intelligence agents is going to get put through the wringer, tortured and beaten up pretty badly, or worse, take a bullet. As it happens, one of the regular 'slow horses' in the Slough House team gets whacked in Spook Street , permanently. Sorry for being blunt about it, but well, it goes with the territory, and there will always be plenty of other candidates to take their place in the secret service's dumping ground. Slough House is where the intelligence services demote those agents who need to be quietly 'let go', some of them having done time in the field and messed up really badly, others who will never be let anywhere near it. Since they can't be trusted to go back into normal society either, exile to Slough House means spending the rest of their days wading through reams of data to ensure that they never forget just how worthless they are. There...