In this book, readers discover what happened to JK Coe prior to becoming a slow horse and why he is a little, ahem, jumpy.

This was the first glimpse into her head and it was in keeping with somebody as the leader of a spook agency. For 21st century spies and politicians, I think the torch has been handed to Herron, who has run with it. Coe was introduced in the novella, The List, and took his place in Slough House in Spook Street; in this novel, the reader learns the details of the ordeal that landed him under Jackson Lamb’s supervision.The only complaint would be very wet clothing and socks and shoes but the book was so well written I really did not allow the physical discomfort to ruin things. It is taut, carefully paced to perfection, scary with regard to MI5, sad in the circumstances of a son's death, brilliant in the former spy's ability to foresee the plotting of the head of MI5, hilarious in some of the torture scenes enacted and simply satisfying. But more than a few people are interested to hear Bettany is back in town, from incarcerated mob bosses to those in the highest echelons of MI5.

This was grittier than the Jackson Lamb books, but it whizzed along and maintained internal coherence throughout. The official account is that he was high on a new, particularly strong blend of marijuana and fell from his own living room window.His wife had died of cancer a few years ago, so the death of his son is a powerful drawcard to bring Tom home to England. I enjoyed the writing which is always to the point, the humour which is often very British and the characters. There’d been a sharp rise in the number of women reading bondage porn in public, but other than that, London had stayed London. Mick Herron already has a host of good mysteries to his name, but he has refined his skills with this one. Set in the world of Herron's Slough House series, and not including Slough House in the tale, Nobody Walks gives me a look into Dame Ingrid Tearney (1st desk at MI5) and the spider webs she spins.

There is plenty of action, some unexpected twists and humour (albeit more subtle than in the Slough House series) before all the pieces slot into place for Tom. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. Nobody Walks is a completely independent novel even though its MI5 is the same as the one in Herron's Slough House series. Bettany might have thought he'd left it all behind when he first skipped town, but nobody ever really walks away.

But there are too many details, blatant and hidden, in every sentence that if missed by the reader will lessen the impact of its ending. Suspicion lands on Vincent Driscoll, Liam's rather odd games-designer boss, and this raises a red flag for MI5. Tom Bettany works in a meat packing facility in France when he hears that his son, Liam, is dead, killed by a fall from his balcony. The Angel neighborhood is where the folks in the tech company are located and it’s apparently a very hip area of London off of the canal. His menial routine cloaked an unusual skill set that he had once expertly wielded for the British Security Service (ie.