Espionage. Blackmail. Revenge. Cunning. Slapstick. State secrets dating back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, CWA Gold Dagger-winning author of Slow Horses.

It's an evening like any other when an explosion rips through the leafy Oxford suburb Sarah Tucker calls home. In the aftermath, a house now stands devastated, with two adults dead and a young girl missing. With the police more interested in keeping the neighbors from rubbernecking than in searching for the missing child, Sarah becomes obsessed with finding her, and enlists the help of Oxford private investigator Zoë Boehm. But Sarah's and Zoë's search reveals more secrets than answers.

The death of Tom Bettany's estranged 26-year-old son brings him back to London. His return sparks the interest of everyone from mobsters to MI5 officers - he may have thought he left his old life as a spy behind, but nobody just walks away. Tom Bettany is working at a meat processing plant in France when he gets the voicemail from an English woman he doesn't know telling him that his estranged 26-year-old son is dead. Liam was smoking dope on his London balcony when he fell....

In CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron’s chillingly plausible first standalone, “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...

Now, for the first time, Herron’s short fiction has been collected into one volume. In Dolphin Junction, devoted fans and future converts alike will find much to amuse, delight, and terrify them. Five stand-alone nerve-racking and thrilling crime fiction stories are complemented by four mystery stories featuring the Oxford wife-and-husband detective team of shrewd Zoë Boehm and hapless Joe Silvermann. The collection also includes a peek into the past of Jackson Lamb, irascible top agent at Slough House.