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Mick Herron, author of The Secret Hours

Two years ago, a hostile Prime Minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating "historical over-reaching" by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any misconduct by any MI5 officer --- and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, access to all confidential information in the Service archives. Now that the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust --- and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away. Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin whose cover-up has rewritten 30 years of Service history.