Paperback: Let us be clear about this much at least: Slough House is not in Slough, nor is it a house. Slough House is Jackson Lamb's kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who have screwed up: left a secret file on a train, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They are the service's poor relations - the slow horses - and bitterest among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.
But when a young man is abducted, and it is threatened that he will be beheaded live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself.
Is the victim who he first appears to be?
And what is the kidnappers' connection with a disgraced journalist?
As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone involved has their own agenda. And unless the slow horses can prove they are not as useless as they are thought to be, a young man's death is going to echo around the world.
Slow Horses (2010) is the first instalment in one of the finest spook fiction series set in England.
About the author: Mick Herron is a novelist and short story writer whose books include the Sarah Tucker/Zoë Boehm series and the standalone novel Reconstruction (2008). His work has been shortlisted for the Macavity, Barry and Shamus awards, and his novella Dolphin Junction was joint winner of the 2009 Ellery Queen Readers Award. His second standalone, Nobody Walks, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger in 2015, and was one of Booklist Magazine’s Best 101 Crime Novels of the Decade.
He is the author of the acclaimed Jackson Lamb series, the first of which, the Steel Dagger-nominated Slow Horses, was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the “the twenty greatest spy novels of all time”. The second in the series, Dead Lions, won the 2013 CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger, and was picked by the Sunday Times as one of the best 25 crime novels of the past five years. The third, Real Tigers, was shortlisted for both the Gold and Steel Daggers, for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, and for the 2017 Macavity Award. It won the Last Laugh Award at Crimefest 2017, for the best humorous crime novel of 2016.
Spook Street, the fourth Jackson Lamb novel – praised by Ian Rankin for its “sublime dialogue and frictionless plotting” – won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2017.
The fifth Jackson Lamb novel, London Rules, will appear on 15 February 2018.
Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford. He writes full time.
Rating: 5/5
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