The Secret Hours

By the author of SLOW HORSES, now an Apple Original series streaming on Apple TV+ starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Monochrome is a busted flush--an inquiry into the misdeeds of the intelligence services, established by a vindictive prime minister but rendered toothless by a wily chief spook. For years it has ground away uselessly, interviewing witnesses with nothing to offer, producing a report with nothing to say, while the civil servants at its helm see their careers disappearing into a black hole.

And then the OTIS file falls into their hands.

What secrets does this hold that see a long-redundant spook being chased through Devon's green lanes in the dark? What happened in a newly reunified Berlin that someone is desperate to keep under wraps? And who will win the battle for the soul of the secret service--or was that decided a long time ago?

Spies and pen-pushers, politicians and PAs, high-flyers, time-servers and burn-outs . . . They all have jobs to do in the daylight.

But what they do in the secret hours reveals who they really are.

New from the author of Slow Horses, now an Apple Original series from Apple TV+, starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Two years ago, a hostile Prime Minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, an auditing of the British Secret Service "to investigate historical over-reaching." Monochrome's mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer--and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kite, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.

But MI5's formidable First Desk did not become Britain's top spy by accident, and she has succeeded thwarting the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that brought Monochrome into being has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust--and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects swirl down the drain in the pounding London rain.

Until the eve of Monochrome's shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a highly classified operation in 1994 Berlin--an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.

The Secret Hours is a dazzling entry point into Mick Herron's body of work, a standalone spy thriller that is at once unnerving, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny. It is also the breathtaking secret history that Slough House fans have been waiting for.