Any new release from Mick Herron, a supremely gifted stylist, should be devoured immediately. Certainly, his Slough House spy thriller series is a genre modern classic (I raved about his previous two novels here and here). Now we are blessed with “Dolphin Junction,” a collection of eleven short stories previously found mostly in mystery magazines. The highlight is “The Last Dead Letter,” a wonderfully atmospheric tale featuring (of course) Slough House’s Jackson Lamb. Four stories star a detective duo from another Herron series, Zoë Boehm and Joe Silvermann, and these feature delightful twists as the pair deal with a stalker, a porn video, a seemingly haunted writer, and a psychotherapist’s couch. The rest are more of a mixed bag, seemingly training runs before his run of novels took off, but they all feature cunning plot revelations that will come as no surprise to Slough House fans. All up, Dolphin Junction is a clever, superior collection of crime fiction tales.
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