Reconstruction

In this chillingly plausible thriller by CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron, “there is no hiding under the desk” (The New York Times Book Review).

When a gunman breaks into South Oxford Nursery School and takes a group of hostages, teacher Louise Kennedy fears the worst. But Jaime Segura isn’t there on a homicidal mission, and he’s just as scared as those whose lives he holds as collateral. As an armed police presence builds outside the school’s gates, the only person Jaime will talk to is Ben Whistler, an MI6 accountant who worked with Jaime’s lover, Miro. Miro’s gone missing, along with a quarter of a billion pounds allotted for reconstruction work in Iraq. Jaime refuses to believe that Miro is a thief—though he’s always had his secrets. But then, so does Louise, so do the other hostages—and so do some people on the outside, who’d much rather Jaime was silenced.

Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and the novella The List) and four Oxford mysteries (Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers), as well as the standalone novels Reconstruction, Nobody Walks and This Is What Happened. 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. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.