Mick Herron is one of the beadiest satirists of our times , but although The Secret Hours (Baskerville, ★★★★★) begins with some horribly familiar political figures whipping up a moral panic for their own ends about the activities of the intelligence services, it’s ultimately less concerned with contemporary idiocies than with bearing us back into the past.  The early part of the book offers a deliciously cynical portrait of the workings of a public inquiry, which eventually, almost despite itself, unearths evidence of an unofficial espionage operation that went badly wrong in Germany in the 1990s. Herron then transports us back to the spy-saturated Berlin of that period, evoking it so brilliantly that John le Carré would be the obvious comparison – if there weren’t a joke in this book about lazy reviewers constantly dubbing any up-and-coming spy novelist “the new John le Carré”.  In fact, Herron is sui generis, and this is one of his best books yet.…