Shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award
Slough House is a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who've screwed up: left a service file on a train, say, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They're the service's poor relations - the slow horses - and most bitter among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.
But when a young man is abducted, and his kidnappers threaten to behead him live on the internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what's the kidnappers' connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone involved has their own agenda . . .
About the Author
Mick Herron is the Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have won two CWA Daggers, been published in 20 languages, and are the basis of a major TV series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He is also the author of the Zoe Boehm series, and the standalone novels Reconstruction and This is What Happened.
Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.
Industry Reviews
'The finest new crime series this Millennium'
Mail on Sunday
Slow Horses is the first novel in the Slough House series by British author, Mick Herron. Slough House is a repository for inconvenient or incompetent spooks: the spies who have caused embarrassment by leaving a sensitive disc in a tube station or had an affair with the Venezuelan ambassador’s wife, or closed down Kings Cross Station in a training exercise. The “Slow Horses” are banished from Regent’s Park to Slough House where the hope is to bore the dead weights into jumping ship, to get them to quit the Service, ground into submission by routine tasks. The current staff of nine are assigned riveting assignments like combing Twitter feeds, monitoring overseas student attendances, scanning through mobile phone conversations and comparing real estate purchases with immigration records, by their boss, Jackson Lamb. Does this make for a harmonious workplace? Indeed it does not! 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 (if at all) veiled. When the 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 garbage bag he was assigned to examine as a harmless errand for the Park. Hungry for action, River decides he has to 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 (with their talents? Unlikely!) and to avoid being scapegoats for an op gone horribly wrong (virtually impossible!). Herron gives the reader a fast-paced spy novel of a very different sort. The premise is original, and the execution is inspired. The characters are all credibly flawed, their dialogue is full of dry wit, and there is plenty of humour, most of it very black and very British, with an abundance of laugh out loud moments. There are twists and red herrings and the reader will find it hard not to cheer these misfits on as they do their best. Readers will be pleased to learn there are three and a half further volumes of this series for their entertainment and enjoyment. A brilliant read!
