Before Slough House, there was Oxford. And behind both series of novels is Mick Herron, one of the best—if not the best—writers of mystery and espionage writers currently working. Having read my way through all eight Slough House novels, not to mention the novellas, I tried my hand at the five novels in the Oxford series.

The first four have as their protagonists either Sarah Tucker (Down Cemetery Road and Smoke and Whispers) or Zoe Boehm (The Last Voice You Hear and Why We Die), though Boehm, either as protagonist or as a key character, is the only one to appear in all of them.

The fifth novel in that series, Reconstruction, has nothing to do with either woman. What makes it part of the series is its location, Oxford. And in some ways, it is a transitional novel between the Oxford and Slough House series because it introduces characters—especially Bad Sam Chapman—who will appear in the later series.

The plot of Reconstruction begins with an attempt to “collect and comfort” a witness, though at the outset, we don’t know what the witness has seen, nor why he is being C-and-C-ed by MI5. That attempt goes horribly wrong, and the witness ends up with one of the MI5 agent’s gun and proceeds to take hostages at an Oxford preschool. When the police begin negotiation, he says he will only talk to a mid-level MI5 accountant named Ben Whistler, though the reason why is anyone’s guess, including Whistler’s.

Meanwhile, inside the preschool, the hostages’ stories begin to unfold. Everyone has a secret, and some of those secrets are related—unbeknownst to them—to the motives of the hostage-taker. Only time will tell whether anyone makes it out alive.

Hovering at the edges of the scene is “Bad Sam Chapman,” chief “Dog” for MI5, who is looking for £250 million that have gone missing from the secret service’s coffers. Why he’s so keen on what’s happening at the Oxford preschool, especially who’s inside, only becomes clear later in the story.

To be honest, although I’m a fan of Herron’s work, Reconstruction took a while for me to warm up to. I picked it up and put it down several times because I couldn’t see the threads connecting the plot. My main criticism of the novel is that it took too much time to get where it needed to go.

However, perseverance paid off in the end. About a third of the way through, I started paying attention as the various subplots began to come together. And, like Herron’s other books, Reconstruction is filled with misdirection. I thought I had things figured out, only to be surprised that I had read the evidence completely wrong. That’s the mark of a good suspense novel!

So, four stars for me for Reconstruction. I feel that Herron could have used tighter editing early on. Once the book engaged my interest, though, it kept me hooked all the way to the end.

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