The blurb:
Tom Bettany is working at a meat processing plant in France when he gets a voicemail from an Englishwoman he doesn't know telling him that his estranged 26-year-old son is dead--Liam Bettany fell from his London balcony, where he was smoking pot.
Now for the first time since he cut all ties years ago, Bettany returns home to London to find out the truth about his son's death. Maybe it's the guilt he feels about losing touch with Liam that's gnawing at him, or maybe he's actually put his finger on a labyrinthine plot, but either way he'll get to the bottom of the tragedy, no matter whose feathers he has to ruffle. But more than a few people are interested to hear Bettany is back in town, from incarcerated mob bosses to those in the highest echelons of MI5. He might have thought he'd left it all behind when he first skipped town, but nobody ever really walks away.
This is a short one, practically in novella territory, one of the added extras Herron writes to flesh out the Slough House world. It's set a little further back in the series chronology: Dame Ingrid Tearney is still First Desk. This introduces JK Coe a character who'll show up later in the main novels—for a few of them, at least—and goes some way to explaining why he's so traumatised.
The story is at once full of of twists and turns and also quite straightforward: Tom Bettany is a former undercover operative and Dog, two jobs that were hard on his family life, to the point that he and his son are not talking, and he's disappeared to work in France at a meat-packing plant. His son dies in what Bettany refuses to believe is an accident, and he comes home to put his former skills to use to find and punish the guilty. So that's the straightforward bit: a revenge story.
Where things get complicated is, his former life gets involved; he was undercover investigating arms dealers. So now he's using both his old undercover identity, which is stirring up danger because there are people he put in jail who'd like a word with him ('a word' being a synonym for 'causing him terrific pain and then burying him in a forest somewhere'), as well as his older Service connections. Ingrid Tearney is involved with her own agenda that also messes things up. And, as the icing on the cake, Bettany meets JK Coe, a relative innocent in the Service, but Bettany soon fixes that.
The usual arc of a revenge story is that the protagonist finds the guilty party, punishes them and then heads off back into their life, either nursing wounds and/or psychological trauma, or with closure to their loss. Or, if you're John Clarke from Without Remorse by Tom Clancy, with a new CIA job to go to. But Nobody Walks subverts that—while Bettany does survive, he doesn't exactly ride off into the sunset.
It's a compressed sort of story, with all the usual twists that you expect from a Mick Herron novel, and a notably downbeat ending. I do have more of these novellas around, but I've mostly been reading the main novels, so I'm going to have to go back and sort of reintegrate the novellas into that main chronology, I think. You don't need to read them—Coe makes sense without reading Nobody Walks—but I do appreciate the extra flavour.
Started: 30 November 2025
Finished: 4 December 2025
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