Book Review – Throw Away the Key by Jason M. Hough @crookedlanebks #20BOS26

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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.”
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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
Website

My Week in Books – 28th June 2026

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On the blog last week

Monday – I shared my review of Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood which will be published by Pushkin Vertigo on 2nd July.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday top was Books On My Summer 2026 To-Read List.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. I also published my (long overdue) review of Paper Sisters by Rachel Canwell.

The space where other reviews should have been except it was too hot to think.

Saturday – I joined other gardeners for #SixonSaturday sharing six things from my garden this week.

New on my shelves

Little Spark by Jess Kidd (Canongate via NetGalley)

A secret cannot stay locked away forever.

Bodkin Bell, orphan, pickpocket and survivor, doesn’t know where she came from, but she knows she’s different. Gaslights flare as she walks past. Cutlery spins. Shocks fly from her fingertips.

For years, she was ‘Little Spark’, the star of an electrifying travelling act – until it went too far and she ended up in a London gaol.

Now she’s been offered a way out. A chance to serve at Point Mote, a vast, desolate house marooned on the misty Kent marshes. There, she will assist a reclusive family of cunning inventors in the creation of automata: miraculous, lifelike machines for which gentlemen collectors will pay handsomely.

But this house of wonders hides mysteries too. As Bodkin starts to question why she is really there, she unearths secrets that have been buried bone-deep for years – and a truth beyond all imagining. One that was never meant to be found.

The Taper Man by Nick Harkaway (Viking via NetGalley)

It is 1965, and the Cold War has never been colder. The Circus – the secret centre of British intelligence – has one prize asset left in Moscow: a senior Red Army officer with access to the enemy’s deepest secrets. But when a British agent is shot in Helsinki, George Smiley uncovers a Soviet operation that imperils this irreplaceable source.

The trail leads Smiley not to Berlin or Vienna, but Los Angeles – the most foreign place he has ever known. There, in the murky heart of US intelligence, a Communist sleeper agent – a ‘Taper Man’ – is poised to expose Britain’s operative in Moscow. To save him, Smiley must navigate an America riven with political tension, all while his spy in Leningrad, Roy Bland, risks everything in pursuit of a Russian defector who holds the final piece of the puzzle.

Doom Painting by A. K. Blakemore (Granta via NetGalley)

It is 1381. England, reeling from plague and years of conflict abroad, is a tinderbox waiting to spark. Two childhood friends ride into the town of Brentwood, Essex, where they come upon an altercation with a local Justice bent on squeezing more coin from the masses. Thus begins a rebellion of the common folk – loyal to the king, but not to those wealthy landowners who curtail their freedoms; the multitude finding cause against the powers that threaten their livelihoods.

Set over sixteen days, Doom Painting roves across England as the revolt grows and swells and the rebels march to London to take their demands to the child-king Richard II. Out of the rebellion emerges its enigmatic and charismatic leader Wat Tyler, an opportunistic and mercurial rogue whose morality is birthed by the cause, and who shapes an identity for the English which has never been lost.

Seething Lane by Jack Jewers (ARC, Moonflower Books)

January 1670. London is enduring its worst winter in decades. But for Samuel Pepys, the darkest days are yet to come.

When a strange young man turns up at his office on Seething Lane asking for help, Samuel Pepys is too distracted to take him seriously. Nell Gwyn is about to make her scandalous return to the stage and he wouldn’t miss it for all the world.

But in the cold of a winter’s dawn, tragedy strikes. Called upon to investigate the brutal murder of a libertine aristocrat, Pepys discovers that the dead man is connected to his mysterious visitor in the most shocking way possible.

A trail of secrets leads Pepys from the backstreets of London to the glamorous world of the theatre, where nothing is quite as it seems. But whatever the dangers, he may find that the deadliest threat lies closer to home…

What I’m currently reading

I’m reading historical novel Daughters of Naples by Diana Giovinazzo, due to be published by Crooked Lane Books on 21st July, and I’m continuing to devour Land by Maggie O’Farrell. Both are on my list for the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. I’m also trying to squeeze in The Artist by Lucy Steeds before attending an author event next Tuesday.

Look out for…

  • Book Review: A Fatal Love by Louisa Treger
  • Book Review: Country People by Daniel Mason
  • Book Review: Throw Away the Key by Jason M. Hough