About the Book
Lars Bergman is no ordinary janitor. He’s the CIA’s locksmith.
Formerly part of the CIA’s infamous Surreptitious Entry Team, Lars is now responsible for every padlock, safe, and secure door across the CIA headquarters. He’s never met a lock he couldn’t pick…except one, which he tried and failed to open during a botched mission in Warsaw at the end of the Cold War.
Cruising toward retirement, Lars’s life is upended when a senior CIA official dies and he’s called upon to open the safe in her office. Inside the safe is a clue only Lars would notice, left by someone he’d worked with in his heyday. As he investigates, Lars soon realizes that his failed Warsaw operation has come back to haunt him and perhaps give him another chance at picking the one lock that’s ever eluded him.
What Lars doesn’t realize is that what the lock is protecting could have dire ramifications for the organization he has spent his whole adult life safekeeping.
Format: Paperback (320 pages) Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Publication date: 14th July 2026 Genre: Thriller
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My Review
Cryptic clues – a photograph and a seemingly innocuous document – found in the safe of a deceased senior CIA officer whom Lars worked with many years before sets him on a trail that leads back to Warsaw, the location of a failed ‘off the books’ mission back in 1989. It’s a failure that’s stuck in his mind ever since because it involved one of the very few locks he was unable to pick and, worst of all, he left a trace of his attempt to do so.
Disguising his trip as a long overdue vacation, Lars sets out on a private mission to uncover the truth, weaving a trail across Europe aimed at covering his tracks so as not to attract the attention of his bosses. It means using the ‘tradecraft’ he learned while in the field all those years ago, such as how to spot covert surveillence. Along with his exceptional lockpicking skills, he has to use a good deal of ingenuity, constructing lockpicking tools out of virtually nothing, and his ‘sixth sense’ for when something’s not quite right.
There are some terrific set-pieces, including one in a Swiss bank that could have come out of a heist movie, and some narrow escapes. Lars is definitely a character you can’t help rooting for and I liked he was able to call in favours from people he’d helped over the years.
Eventually, the trail leads back to CIA headquarters and some dramatic scenes as a conspiracy years in the making is revealed. It’s here that Lars’ ingenuity really comes to the fore, proving that the weak points in any organisation’s security are usually at the back door and come with a High Vis jacket.
It’s clear the book is the result of extensive research, especially into locks and lockpicking. I’m not sure I could unpick a lock using the descriptions in the book but that’s my failing not the author’s. However I could bandy around terms such as ‘wiper tension bar’ and ‘shim’. And I now know there is such a thing as competitive lockpicking and that there’s an annual LockCon conference attended by lockpicking experts from across the world.
Throw Away the Key is a really entertaining, well-paced spy thriller. Think the love child of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mission Impossible.
I received a digital advance reader copy courtesy of Crooked Lane Books. Throw Away the Key is book 8 of my 20 Books of Summer 2026.
In three words: Clever, compelling, pacy
Try something similar: The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson
About the Author
Jason M. Hough (pronounced ‘Huff’) is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Dire Earth Cycle, Instinct, and the near-future spy thriller Zero World, which Publisher’s Weekly said is “a thrilling action rampage that confirms Hough as an important new voice in genre fiction.”
In a former life he was a 3D artist, animator, and game designer (Metal Fatigue, Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction, and many others). He has worked in the fields of high-performance cluster computing and mobile user interfaces, and is named as co-inventor on three patents related to mobile content and licensing.
He lives near Seattle, Washington with his family. When not writing, reading, or hanging out with his kids, he spends his time chasing espresso perfection (with mixed results), and taking long road trips in his electric car.
Connect with Jason
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