"The nursery" by Asia Mackay

An audio book.

Lex (Alexis) has a husband Will and 2 y.o. a daughter Gigi. Will doesn't know that for years she's been working for MI6 as a rat (a killer) with an HQ by platform 8 at Holburn tube station, London. The service has been infiltrated by snakes and is going into lockdown. A website, Tenebris (maybe UK-based), connects people with info to people who will pay for it. Lex's group use school jargon as codewords - characters from Pippa Pig etc. Toys are useful items to hide bugs in. Headless dolls might be nightmarish and boobytrapped. Are lone men spies, paedophiles or divorced fathers?

A Chinese minister is visiting for a few days and Lex's group needs to protect her. She meets Johnny at an airport - rockstar and ex-lover, and while there plants a listening bug. Will's worried that their relationship is struggling. She tells him about Johnny. He realises that a song of Johnny that he danced to is about Lex. She wonders why Will gets texts in the night. She's attracted to Frederick, a colleague whose child is at the same nursery as Gigi. Sometimes they discuss work while with the children, interleaving 2 discourses. When Gigi gets into trouble for fighting at school, Lex worries that her daughter might have inherited assassin genes. She contacts partners of colleagues, pretending it's for social reasons but actually trying to gather info about her colleagues. Lex is alone in the HQ when "ghosts" attack. She manages to disable/kill them. Robin, a colleague, is taken away.

The chinese minister attends a hunt at a Lord's hunt. A death threat is narrowly averted. She begins to suspect Frederick and panics when the nursery tells her that Frederick took Gigi home. All is ok. Later Frederick abandons his daughter. Lex collects her and calls his wife Camilla. She says Frederick has been asking strangely. The house is searched. Children's drawing were coded messages. Playdough was actually C4 explosive. The minister's last engagement is at Christie's. Frederick has put drugged Robin under the auction room, a bomb tied to him. She defuses the bomb and saves Robin. Frederick escapes. He'd had the idea for Tenebris, funded by 2 city boys. A nursery teacher was a go-between. Access to Tenebris is gained with invaluable data about people, wants and skills. Lex and Will patch their relationship up.

Enjoyable. I didn't realise until reading the reviews that this was the 2nd of a series. I liked the way that nursery life is braided with the spy world though the section about political correctness in fairy tales goes on too long.

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