Secret Hours delights in complicated plotting that occasionally makes you despair whether you're understanding as much as you should be. Don't worry. You are ... There's wit and suspense on almost every page of The Secret Hours, where the good guys are bad, the bad guys are worse and the reader is in luck.
A special treat ... Mr. Herron’s narrative moves with ease between present and past, England and Germany, action and satire, propelled by prescient commentary on the passage of time ... Culminates in an astonishing denouement that should startle even the savviest spy-fiction fan.
Herron’s cultivated air of default world-weariness doesn’t preclude outbreaks of icy cynicism and admirable idealism as well as a certain wry self-awareness ... Maybe the politicos are a bit on the nose and readers would have grasped that events are taking place in the present day without needing asides about kale smoothies and Wordle. But Herron obviously relishes his digs at the many real-life shambles that have played out so garishly since, say, 2016 ... And if there is any sense that Herron has filled in his background with broad brushstrokes, as ever he has reserved his most delicate and affecting work for his characters in the foreground.
Never has a work of popular fiction delighted me more ... An unusually satisfying spy novel, with fully developed characters, first-rate dialogue... and a sense of depth.
Slow burning, artfully told and explosive ... Sly and suspenseful, The Secret Hours is both a marvelous standalone novel and a stunning companion to Herron’s Slough House series.
