Mick Herron’s latest book is about a supposedly retired academic and a government inquiry into the intelligence services.
“The worst smell in the world is a dead badger.
But back to the dead badger as discovered by Max Janacek, purportedly a retired academic “still footling around with a history book”. Woken by an intruder in his cottage, Max defends himself with a poker in ways that suggest another set of skills entirely. After leading his pursuers on a merry chase along the green lanes of Devon, in which the dead badger inevitably plays a role, Max makes his escape via the long-established emergency exit every good ex-spy should have.
Cut to part two, and the Monochrome Inquiry set up to investigate presumed misdemeanours in the intelligence service. Designed to fail, it is led by Griselda Fleet, a black woman in her 50s struggling to pay off the acquired debts of her profligate ex-husband. Her assistant is the anxious and chagrined Malcolm Kyle, who has come to realise that their project was doomed from the start.
Until, that is, someone hides a top-secret file from the archives under the fishcakes in Malcolm’s supermarket trolley and the game is on: “Monochrome, the creaky, thwarted inquiry with all the forward momentum of a slapped moth, had just gone live.” Just how Max, and everyone else we encounter, is connected to this file will be the work of a labyrinthine narrative that starts in the now but returns to Berlin in the 1990s, then affectionately known as “The Spooks Zoo”, following the fall of the wall. The point being, as Herron archly notes, that as in a zoo, all the animals are “on display”.There are spies and more spies, but just who is spying on whom and why? Nothing and no one are quite what they seem.
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