Slow Horses
Author: Mick Herron
Published by: John Murray Press
Pages: 328
Format: Paperback
My Rating ★★★★
Published by: John Murray Press
Pages: 328
Format: Paperback
My Rating ★★★★
Spooks are supposed to be stealthy… But those who make a noisy mess of their careers end up in Slough House.
This is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom: a dumping ground for spies who’ve screwed up. Once highfliers, they’re now slow horses, condemned to a life of pushing paper as punishment for crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal. In drab and mildewed offices, these highly trained spies moan and squabble, stare at the walls, and dream of better days – not one of them joined the Intelligence Service to be a slow horse, and the one thing they have in common is their desire to be back in the action.
So, when a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, his beheading scheduled for live broadcast on the net, the slow horses aren’t going to just sit quietly and watch. And unless they can prove they’re not as useless as they’re thought to be, a public execution is going to echo round the world.
This is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom: a dumping ground for spies who’ve screwed up. Once highfliers, they’re now slow horses, condemned to a life of pushing paper as punishment for crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal. In drab and mildewed offices, these highly trained spies moan and squabble, stare at the walls, and dream of better days – not one of them joined the Intelligence Service to be a slow horse, and the one thing they have in common is their desire to be back in the action.
So, when a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, his beheading scheduled for live broadcast on the net, the slow horses aren’t going to just sit quietly and watch. And unless they can prove they’re not as useless as they’re thought to be, a public execution is going to echo round the world.
.My thoughts:
Slow Horses is the first of Mick Herron’s Slough House series of alt-spy thrillers. This is a tense thriller about washed-up spies, featuring sharp dialogue and clever plotting. It is totally entertaining.
Slough House is an old derelict building. Its occupants are slow horses; spies who have screwed up in various ways and been demoted. They have all done something irreversible and cringe-worthy, from leaving classified information on a train to failing a terrorist training exercise with many innocent casualties.
Now the slow horses are essentially paper pushers doing mundane work. They are a motley crew who are not friends, very suspicious, always alert, aware, and bitter. They may all be equally frustrated at their exclusion from real ops, but they barely tolerate each other, and their dislike for their boss is thinly veiled. The characters are unglamorous has-beens and are looked down on by their colleagues in MI5.
Ruling over all the misfits at Slough House, is Jackson Lamb. No one knows what Lamb did to end up at Slough House all those years ago. An ex-field agent during the cold war, he's described as fat, lazy, unwashed with stained, greasy clothing but able to move rapidly with stealth when required. He also knows a lot of secrets and how to manipulate people. Lamb is a gem of a character quite unlike any other spymaster in fiction.
River Cartwright is full of resentment, both towards his supervisors who set him up for failure in his opinion, and towards his new colleagues, who probably deserved to be put to pasture.
When newsfeeds show a youth of Pakistani extraction being threatened with beheading by an obscure right-wing extremist group, slow horse River Cartwright immediately makes a connection to the right-wing former journalist whose rubbish bag he was assigned to examine as a harmless errand for Regent’s Park. Hungry for action, River decides he must do something, but his covert surveillance does not end well. Before long, the Slough House crew find themselves in a race against time to save the boy.
Slow Horses takes a while to get moving, but I certainly enjoyed the writing - wry and sharp, often darkly humorous and deprecating of the failed spies from MI5 who end up at the bottom of the heap, the so-called 'slow horses' working at London's Slough House. I particularly enjoyed the second half of the book, when the slow horses work together, and the pace really picks up.
With political intelligence, subtle characterisation, and a sharp writing style, Slow Horses makes for an engrossing read. I’m looking forward to diving into book two.
A big thank you again to Tandem Collective for sending me out a copy of the book to read and review, along with access to the new Apple TV+ series adaptation.
Overall reaction:
Slow Horses is the first of Mick Herron’s Slough House series of alt-spy thrillers. This is a tense thriller about washed-up spies, featuring sharp dialogue and clever plotting. It is totally entertaining.
Slough House is an old derelict building. Its occupants are slow horses; spies who have screwed up in various ways and been demoted. They have all done something irreversible and cringe-worthy, from leaving classified information on a train to failing a terrorist training exercise with many innocent casualties.
Now the slow horses are essentially paper pushers doing mundane work. They are a motley crew who are not friends, very suspicious, always alert, aware, and bitter. They may all be equally frustrated at their exclusion from real ops, but they barely tolerate each other, and their dislike for their boss is thinly veiled. The characters are unglamorous has-beens and are looked down on by their colleagues in MI5.
Ruling over all the misfits at Slough House, is Jackson Lamb. No one knows what Lamb did to end up at Slough House all those years ago. An ex-field agent during the cold war, he's described as fat, lazy, unwashed with stained, greasy clothing but able to move rapidly with stealth when required. He also knows a lot of secrets and how to manipulate people. Lamb is a gem of a character quite unlike any other spymaster in fiction.
River Cartwright is full of resentment, both towards his supervisors who set him up for failure in his opinion, and towards his new colleagues, who probably deserved to be put to pasture.
When newsfeeds show a youth of Pakistani extraction being threatened with beheading by an obscure right-wing extremist group, slow horse River Cartwright immediately makes a connection to the right-wing former journalist whose rubbish bag he was assigned to examine as a harmless errand for Regent’s Park. Hungry for action, River decides he must do something, but his covert surveillance does not end well. Before long, the Slough House crew find themselves in a race against time to save the boy.
Slow Horses takes a while to get moving, but I certainly enjoyed the writing - wry and sharp, often darkly humorous and deprecating of the failed spies from MI5 who end up at the bottom of the heap, the so-called 'slow horses' working at London's Slough House. I particularly enjoyed the second half of the book, when the slow horses work together, and the pace really picks up.
With political intelligence, subtle characterisation, and a sharp writing style, Slow Horses makes for an engrossing read. I’m looking forward to diving into book two.
A big thank you again to Tandem Collective for sending me out a copy of the book to read and review, along with access to the new Apple TV+ series adaptation.
Overall reaction:
