The Secret Hours by Mich Herron -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

The Secret Hours by Mich Herron

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

The worse smell in the world is dead badger.

-- from The Secret Hours by Mich Herron.

The Secret Hours is a prequel to Mick Herron's Slow Horses series. I love all the Slow Horses books, so am happy to dive into the backstory behind Jackson Lamb and his crew of misfits. 

I meant to be reading my book club's next book this week. But I just couldn't hack another "heartwarming story of love and redemption." I'm in the mood for ascerbic, exciting, and edgy, not more crosscultural historical fiction with a braided narrative of a young American woman today looking for her family history in a far away land.  

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from The Secret Hours:

This morning, as at every other hour of the day, Neezer wore a pork-pie hat and a plaid waistcoat over a white shirt and black jeans, an unlit roll-up in the corner of his mouth completing the outfit. When he heard Max approaching over the redundant cattle grid, he was making coffee in a microwave hooked up to a generator that had the kind of dry cough that would call for a lateral flow test if a human had it, and benignly watching a man who looked about eighty trying to load a dishwasher into the back of a van.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

Two years ago, a hostile prime minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.

But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.

Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.

The Secret Hours is a dazzling entry point into Mick Herron’s body of work, a standalone spy thriller that is at once unnerving, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny. It is also the breathtaking secret history that Slough House fans have been waiting for.