This is Mick Herron's debut novel. It's very good and I could see how he was honing his craft. Instead of inventing a better mousetrap, he was learning how to structure a better espionage novel. I like his Slough House series better, mostly I think because the spies have become the main characters. In this novel, our main set of eyes is a bored housewife. When an explosion happens just down the street, she becomes fixated on the four year old survivor. Her mission becomes finding this child, dragging her into the sights of the spooks, who are disinclined to be gentle.
Although I don't know how realistic Sarah's sense of mission is. But perhaps because her life is in danger of coming apart at the seams, she has nothing left to lose. Nothing that she does seems too hard for a regular woman, but to keep on going in the face of obvious danger—I think I would have chickened out much earlier. However that wouldn't have made for a good story.
I felt like Herron wrote Sarah really well. He depicts her as a real person, realizing that her marriage is strained to the breaking point, that it has constrained her as a person, and that she has no idea where things are going. But she felt real to me, having emotions that I can relate to.
I decided some time ago that I wanted to read all of Herron's novels, and now I have made a good start.
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