Joe Country

David Cartwright is buried, and the man at the graveside is River’s father: Frank Harkness, the Service’s own unmentionable, back in the country. Diana Taverner is First Desk at last and already consolidating: her first act is to offer Emma Flyte a sideways move into Slough House, which Flyte refuses, and the newest slow horse arrives with a past the others cannot stomach. Then Lucas Harper — Min’s son, the boy Louisa never met — goes missing from a Welsh college, and the search takes the house into the snow: a corporate retreat with an assault course, a hill farm with a private army, and a tradecraft that kills the people who taught it.

Joe Country (2019), 15 chapters, 100,554 words.

Prologue — 826 words
“The owl flew screaming from the barn, its wingtips bright with flame. For a moment, silhouetted against the blank sky, it was a dying angel, scorched …”
Chapter 1 — 7,720 words
“Cities sleep with their lights on, as if they’re afraid of the dark. Up and down their roads, clustering at junctions, streetlights make daisy chains …”
Chapter 2 — 6,040 words
“On Saturday morning Lech Wicinski left the basement flat in Crouch End that he shared with his fiancée, intending to buy a pint of milk. There was a …”
Chapter 3 — 8,086 words
“Mondays are bastards, through and through; Thursdays are waiting days, neither one thing nor the other. Fridays: everyone knows what they’re like. But …”
Chapter 4 — 6,999 words
“That afternoon, at Slough House, Lamb held what he insisted on calling a postmortem.”
Chapter 5 — 6,409 words
““Why didn’t I know that Frank Harkness was in-country?””
Chapter 6 — 8,279 words
“That evening—while River was turning off his computer at Slough House, then rebooting immediately, thinking ten more minutes; just ten more minutes …”
Chapter 7 — 6,313 words
“It was snowing by the time Louisa crossed into Wales.”
Chapter 8 — 7,157 words
“When his buzzer buzzed, breaking sleep, River assumed it was a malfunction. His buzzer never buzzed. Buzzers were for friends he didn’t have; maybe …”
Chapter 9 — 6,303 words
“The key safe was a small plastic box, the size of a cigarette packet, fastened to the outside wall at ankle height. To remove the key, you brushed it …”
Chapter 10 — 6,657 words
“The first task of snow is to make everything new; its second, to make the same scene creak with age. By early Saturday morning London’s snow was …”
Chapter 11 — 6,669 words
““There’s stables out back of the Hall,” Lucas had told them. This had been in the shed the night before. Cobwebbed patchy dark, with every movement …”
Chapter 12 — 9,218 words
“The thing about someone else’s car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.”
Chapter 13 — 6,186 words
“She supposed she’d get used to wearing Emma’s coat sooner or later; probably around the time Emma wanted it back.”
Chapter 14 — 7,692 words
“Martin Kreutzmer liked to read The Guardian, because it kept him in touch with that strain of self-lacerating smugness which hoped to inherit the …”
Open Questions — Joe Country
Question What does Joe Country leave open on purpose, what does it leave open by habit, and what is left over by accident? Evidence …
POV Map — Joe Country
Question Who does Joe Country see through, and what does that distribution give the reader that a single viewpoint would not? Evidence …
Structure — Joe Country
Question How is Joe Country built, and what does its shape do that the previous books’ shapes did not? Evidence Unit Chapters Words Sections …
Timeline — Joe Country
Question When does Joe Country happen, and how tightly is the action dated? Evidence The text dates four things outright, and everything …