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Narrated by Julia Franklin
Mick HerronUnabridged — 12 hours, 55 minutes
Narrated by Julia Franklin
Mick HerronUnabridged — 12 hours, 55 minutes
Mick Herron never tells a suspense story in the expected way, which is why his new novel, Reconstruction, reads as much like a puzzle mystery as it does a thriller. When young Jaime Segura slips into the South Oxford Nursery School and waves a gun at the teacher, cleaning lady, parent and two little boys he takes hostage, unpleasant things are bound to happen, and they do—but not until Herron has finished surprising us.
—The New York Times
Near the start of this masterful thriller from Herron (Why We Die), Jaime Segura, a young immigrant to Britain with a gun, takes several hostages one morning at the South Oxford Nursery School, including a teacher, the school's cleaner, parent Eliot Pedlar and Pedlar's three-year-old twin sons. Jaime is confused and afraid but he's not crazy, and what he wants becomes apparent very slowly. Though Secret Service agent Ben Whistler's usual beat is the MI6 accounting department, he's summoned to the nursery school after Jaime tells the surrounding police that Ben is the only one he'll talk to. Then there's the matter of the quarter of a billion pounds that's been stolen from the Service. How Herron is able to tie all these events together will test the sleuthing ability of even the most savvy readers as one surprise engenders another. The intricate plot, coupled with Herron's breezy writing style ("Ben Whistler looked like what you got when you thought about a rugby player, then fixed his teeth"), results in superior entertainment that makes most other novels of suspense appear dull and slow-witted by comparison. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Adult/High School -This contemporary British novel deals with terrorists, hostage taking, and characters who appear to keep changing allegiances. The story opens on a perfectly ordinary day in suburbia. Then the scene changes. An old man approaches a young man, but the young man hits him with his backpack and flees, while a car hits the old man. In the midst of this a gun is lost and then found, and by page 50 the young man has taken a father, his twin sons, and two nursery school employees as hostages. Scenes move from character to character, and with each shift readers learn a bit more about what's actually going on, who is responsible for what, and why individuals who think the world revolves around them are in for a rude awakening. Teens who aren't already Anglophiles may need to brush up on British slang and idioms to thoroughly understand all that happens, but the reward is good escape literature that should provide a few hours of diversion and entertainment.-Joanne Ligamari, Rio Linda School District, Sacramento, CA
Herron (Why We Die, 2006, etc.) works some nifty changes on the familiar story of a terrorist who takes refuge-and hostages-in a London preschool. Jaime Segura's day begins when he emerges from a rest-stop toilet to find a car with two armed men wanting a word with him. As he runs from them, one of them is struck by a passing car, and Jaime pauses long enough to take his pistol before disappearing. The next time he's seen, he's using the gun to encourage Eliot Pedlar to unlock the gate to his twin sons' preschool. This early in the day, before the staff and students have arrived, the only people waiting inside are Louise Kennedy, an assistant teacher with an unusual background in banking, and Judith Ainsworth, a cleaner and widow. Despite the vigilance of the young man with the gun, Louise manages to alert a security guard to contact the police, and the six ill-assorted souls sit and stew while they await further developments. Chief among these is the arrival of Ben Whistler, an accountant from the Soho office of MI6 whose presence Jaime has demanded. Herron's kaleidoscopic presentation makes it challenging to fit even the most basic pieces of the puzzle together, but eventually it becomes clear that Her Majesty's Government has recently lost £250 million to Miro Weiss, Jaime's vanished lover, and Bad Sam Chapman, among others at MI6, is convinced that Jaime knows where the thief and the money are. At least that's the official story. Taking a page from Jeffery Deaver, however, Herron makes sure nothing and no one is exactly what he, she or it seems to be, and every action that seems destined to clarify the situation ends up cutting two ways. Ingenious and heartfelt, though like Deaver,Herron is so eager to pile on the plot twists that he risks serious reader fatigue.
Praise for Reconstruction
“Mick Herron never tells a suspense story in the expected way, which is why his new novel, Reconstruction, reads as much like a puzzle mystery as it does a thriller . . . unpleasant things are bound to happen, and they do—but not until Herron has finished surprising us.”
—The New York Times Book Review
"Masterful . . . How Herron is able to tie all these events together will test the sleuthing ability of even the most savvy readers as one surprise engenders another. The intricate plot, coupled with Herron’s breezy writing style . . . results in superior entertainment that makes most other novels of suspense appear dull and slow-witted by comparison."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Ingenious and heartfelt."
—Kirkus Reviews
"In Herron's complex story everyone is a reconstructionist, either of their own baggage or of other people's lives or of the events around them . . . Spellbinding."
—Mysterious Reviews
“Reconstruction sizzles and dazzles as readers slowly become more fully aware of the unique relationships between complex characters in this complicated tale.”—BookLoons
Praise for Mick Herron
"Stylish and engaging."
—Washington Post
“Tough, bright and highly promising.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Good characterization, dialogue and well-paced narrative make this confident first novel frighteningly plausible.”
—Daily Telegraph
Anna Bentinck delivers a masterful rendering of this nail-biter about a desperate and confused young man who is holding hostages in a British nursery school. Much of the story's suspense stems from the thoughts, fears, and tribulations of the individual characters—the gunman, a nursery school teacher, the school's janitor, an awkward father with 3-year-old twin sons, the MI6 accountant who finds himself drawn inexorably into the situation. Bentinck's reading nimbly captures it all. Rage, despair, terror, disillusionment—all are portrayed in a manner that catapults this reading into an audio production that far exceeds the experience of the book in print. A masterpiece of a performance. M.L.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940177383255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Isis Publishing Ltd |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 952,689 |
In cartoons, when the alarm rings, the cat, mouse, dog, whatever, hauls a mallet from under the pillow and BAM!—cogs, levers and coils go everywhere; the clock face droops from its casing like a cuckoo on a spring . . . Morning is broken. In the real world, you simply reach a slow hand out and depress the button so the ringing stops. And for the moment it takes this to happen, you’re held between two worlds: the dream life in which mallets are hidden under pillows by pyjama-clad animals, and the default waking mode in which you blink twice, remember who you are, and feel detail seep back into you the way light infiltrates the room—you’re Louise Kennedy, you’re thirty-two years old, and today is either the first day of the rest of your life or the last day of your old one, depending on how things work out. It’s Tuesday, April 3rd. The weather’s set for fair. Sunlight has already reached the bedspread, drawing upon it a range of shadow mountains whose outcrops and valleys exactly match the folds and ridges of the curtaintops. It’s time to get up. It’s time to get up.
Louise muffles a sigh, and pulls herself out of bed.
6:45.
This is where it begins.
And this, too, is where it begins; an hour earlier, and some five miles from Louise’s bed: in a grey lay-by, shielded from the A40 by a row of gasping trees.
This stretch of the road, this time of the morning, most traffic is headed the other way; the first leg of the pilgrimage into London, hauling workers on to the motorway and firing them through the chalk cutting on the county border, where red kites ride the thermals overhead; then on past the redaubed stretch of graffiti (Why do I still do this every day?) to the stilted Westway and the congestion-charged canyons beyond. But George Trebor’s on the homeward leg of the Lille/Birmingham run, and this lay-by is where he parked overnight; partly because the legislation won’t let him ply his sixteen-wheeled trade twelve hours at a stretch; partly because there’s a loo here; but mostly because the back of his cab’s a fine and private place, unlike a two-up/two-down containing three teenage boys and a harassed wife. Which is maybe why he’s overslept, and is still in the cab sorting out shaving gear when a car pulls off the road, passes his rig, and parks outside the brick toilet. There’s another truck behind George’s but nothing in front, so he has a clear view of the car, which is a dark blue BMW with two occupants, neither of whom emerges. They’re both male. No clue as to what they’re doing: checking a map, maybe. Drawing straws to see who takes the first leak.
That’s when he sees the boy coming out of the toilet.
Most days, Louise played the radio softly during breakfast; the Today programme, or—if reality pressed too heavily on her—Radio 2. This morning, though, she opted for silence, or what passed for it in this stretch of South Oxford, where the early morning hum from the railside works plugged any gaps left by the Abingdon Road traffic. Her kitchen window looked out on a meadow—the Ham—beyond which lay the railway line, where Railtrack operated a pick-and-mix gravel concession, or that’s what it looked like. Trucks and what the Darlings called digger lorries shunted to and fro around it from the early hours, their diesel-powered belching blunted by an eight-foot baffle without which—presumably—everything would have been much noisier. It was part of the background hum, and throbbed beneath the morning like the area’s heartbeat. Louise was barely conscious of it; was utterly irony-free in choosing radio silence.
Besides, she wasn’t at liberty to make noise these days.
The bedroom above the kitchen—there were two bedrooms in this almost comically narrow house, whose front door opened directly on to the living room—had, until lately, been the other bedroom; the one that wasn’t Louise’s. And now it had become her mother’s bedroom instead; that M attaching to other to produce a wholly opposite shade, the way dawn changes to dusk, one letter at a time—down, mown, moon, moot, most, must, musk . . .
Above her head her mother slept, while Louise prepared breakfast in silence.
The boy saw the BMW and came to a halt, middle of the lay-by. George Trebor, watching for no special reason—except that’s what you did, watch, when something was happening—had a plain view of this; enough to realize that already, even before he was fully aware of paying witness, his version had come askew from reality. Because this wasn’t a boy, precisely. More like twenty—bumfluffed rather than bearded, but beyond the point at which the mouth seems too big for the head; the nose too small for the face. He was dark-skinned, and looked, George thought, exhausted—like the next big wind would blow him away. He wore jeans and a dark green bomber jacket, and a rucksack hung from his left shoulder; he grasped its strap with his left hand, while his right was thrust into his pocket. No: it hung from his right shoulder, and all those details were reversed. George had trouble with left/right when applying them to someone facing him. Anyway, middle of the lay-by, halfway to the car, the young man stopped and dropped his head to one side, as if assessing the occupants. Working the rent, was George’s appraisal. He himself had worked the roads long enough to be unshocked by the probability. Working the rent: but Jesus, kid, you really don’t want to be getting into a car with two men. Any professional sex situation involving two on one: you’ll be torn apart.
Maybe that’s what the boy was thinking. Either way, he moved no closer to the car. Looked, in fact, kind of scared.
George wasn’t even pretending he wasn’t watching now, but it wasn’t like anybody knew. Height of the cab, he might have been sitting in the royal box. The boy wasn’t looking his way anyway; his eyes were fixed on the car, and his lips moving—saying what, George couldn’t tell: might have been a price-tag; might have been a name.
The car door opened, and one of the men stepped out.
Elsewhere, alarm clocks weren’t necessary.
Eliot Pedlar lay on his back, eyes open, and listened to family life unfolding along the corridor—his wife’s happy murmur; his children’s giggling—the way it did every morning. The children were awake by six—hell, six was a good day—and two seconds after their first stirring, Christine was out of bed and through the door; his last glimpse of her, the flash of a dimly remembered bottom under a solely functional nightie.
“The wheels on the bus—”
“go round and round round and—”
“round round and rou—”
“nd the wheels on the bus go—”
Round and round. Sometimes he couldn’t tell where his sons’ voices broke off; where his wife’s began. As if, together, they formed a perfect circle, outside of which he was always hovering; going round and round, without ever breaking in.
The twins were nearly four; his wife almost exactly three decades older. And he couldn’t tell them apart? That wasn’t cute so much as kind of disturbing.
It was 6:50. He had time for another ten minutes’ sleep, but his chances of achieving it were zero.
Waking thoughts were supposed to be creative thoughts—the hinterland of dreams was where consciousness dipped into the myth kitty, and pulled out useful images. That was the theory, but actually he’d woken up drenched in the Memory again—the Memory being less of a series of mental pictures tied to emotions than an actual physical state he’d been imprisoned in for almost a week . . . His right hand reached for his cock. His eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. Chris bustled into the room. “Are you still okay to do the boys this morning?”
Eliot eased both hands from under the duvet.
“Of course,” he said.
“You hadn’t forgotten?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
Forgetting wasn’t his problem, recently. Remembering was what was driving him crazy.
And then there was Judy . . .
There was a clock-radio on Judy’s bedside table, which was paid for. When she opened her eyes, it read 6:55. Waking—coming round to what the clock said—was the usual brutal infraction: a list to be ticked off—what the world owed Judy; what Judy owed the world. The equation always weighed heavy on her side of the maths. The world should know this by now, but feigned ignorance.
Judith Ainsworth turned the radio off, and dragged herself out of bed. The light creeping through the curtains pointed out her surroundings’ imperfections, but then it always did.
I don’t want to be a burden.
You’re not a burden, mum. I like having you here.
Don’t let me stop you doing what you want to do.
You don’t. Honest.
Have you thought about getting some nice ornaments for that mantelpiece? It’s a bit bare.
(Louise lived in fear of returning home to find an unacceptable ceramic the new centrepiece of her living room: a thank-you gift it would be impossible to overthrow.)
I won’t be with you longer than I have to be.
And how did Louise respond to that? Which meant what, anyway? That death was so imminent there was little point in Louise increasing the milk order? Or that her mother, Susan, would be heading home soon; the heart attack filed away under Unpleasantnesses We Don’t Talk About, Thank You Very Much?
Louise buttered toast, and wondered whether not putting the radio on was because she didn’t want to hear it, or because she didn’t want to disturb her mother (I don’t mind you listening to the radio in the morning, dear. It doesn’t wake me). You were always ten years old when you were watching TV with your parents and a sex scene erupted. And you were always prone to the most painful guilts when your mother told you what she didn’t mind: Go on and rip my heart out, Louise. Trample it into the carpet. I don’t mind. It’s been attacked once already.
She gave up on her toast. There were more important aspects to breakfast. Fishing the back door key from its hook, she let herself into the yard—twelve square feet of cracked, uneven paving, hemmed by a low wall bordering the Ham—and lit a cigarette; the first of her daily pair. Giving up had never been a problem for Louise; it was only the first and last of the day she had trouble forgoing. Those were the two she’d hung on to when she’d discarded the habit, along with her previous job, a lover, her London flat, cocaine bingeing, and the sense she’d somehow—it didn’t have a name, this feeling; was simply a cloud that descended in the early hours—that she’d somehow fucked up everything, even if from the outside it had looked like she was fast-tracked to the glittering prizes. Not smoking between the bracketing pair was made easier by the fact that she rarely smoked in public. Secrecy (she preferred to consider it discretion) was something she’d had to learn anyway. Her lover, for instance, had been her married boss.
Who today, of all days, was likely to weigh heavy on her mind.
Resting a palm on the wall, Louise looked out across the meadow. Mist curled round the trees at its farthest edge, but it would be fine later—this was a simple rule: days you felt low were likely to shine, just to make you feel worse. Besides, this had been the pattern lately; mist giving way to bright warm weather.
She smoked her cigarette to its filter, and dabbed it out on a mossed-over patch of brick. One tiny coal survived its bludgeoning, until a gust of wind whipped it out of existence.
It was 7:14.
