My favourite author in this genre, so unsurprisingly I have read this before. This is the one where Louisa Guy is contacted by the ex-wife of her deceased ex-spook lover and is told that their son had disappeared.
A slightly guilt-ridden Louisa (lovely girl) tracks him down to Wales, where it transpires that he is trying to extort money from a company that provides corporate hospitality to the rich and famous, and has witnessed a thinly disguised senior royal behaving in an un-royal way.
Needless to say, the event has been organised by some pretty corrupt politicians with MI5 connections, who have paid some freelance heavies, including River’s father, to cover things up.
These books all start in the beautifully described Slough House opposite the Barbican in London but move out to the countryside where all the action happens. One of the slow horses and Emma Flyte, the glamorous ex-dog, dies in the action but the rest of the team and of course Jackson Lamb sort things out behind the scenes. Very good, as ever.
You could describe Mick Herron, inaccurately, as the heir to John Le Carré and I don’t think these books could have been written without Le Carré’s novels about the circus. But Slough House is set in such clever antithesis to MI5 (now based in plush offices near Regent’s Park) that another, although equally inaccurate way to put it would be to say that Herron is Ben Jonson to Le Carré’s Shakespeare, although that flatters Le Carré.