Unfinished business in Berlin: The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron, reviewed

During the summer, I noticed a new noise coming from the crowd whenever Ben Stokes or another English player bashed or stroked the ball to the boundary. It wasn’t quite the cheer you’d expect; more an ahhhh of appreciation, as you would deliver to someone who is offering a masterclass in how to win a game when it has, to all intents and purposes, already been won. By the time I was about halfway through The Secret Hours, that was the noise I was making in my head, as new twists kept unfolding. And they did keep unfolding, if twists can be said to unfold, right up until the last page. Never has a work of popular fiction delighted me more.

Herron has come to fame through his Slow Horses series about an office staffed by agents working for the British Secret Service who have screwed up – not so seriously as to be fired or shot but badly enough to be shunted into dead-end jobs from which it is intended they resign of their own accord. You might have seen the television series – an example of a screen adaptation which does an admirable job with the original. (Amusingly, Herron himself does not have Apple TV, on which the show is streamed.)

You do not have to know those books to enjoy The Secret Hours. What you will be reading is an unusually satisfying spy novel, with fully developed characters, first-rate dialogue (‘You’re trying to frighten me.’ ‘How’m I doing?’) and turns of phrase (‘He allowed a moment’s silence to laminate that fact’), and a sense of depth, the story being set in the present, but with long flashbacks to 1994 Berlin, the Cold War over but with plenty of unfinished business to attend to.