When an old man is found dead on a bus Jackson Lamb is convinced that there are links to an underground network of Russian spies. The spooks at Slough House have to put their lives on the line to uncover the truth.
Having loved all three series of Slow Horses on TV I'm determined to read the first four books in the series before season four premiers. I read the first book in the series, Slow Horses, back in January of this year. The second season of the TV series is based on the second book, Dead Lions.
The first part of the story focuses on Jackson Lamb, the prickly, unkempt, un-PC head of Slough House in his quest to figure out what an old spy had uncovered. Discovering a cryptic message the hunt is on for a Russian spy who possibly doesn't exist and was simply invented to cause confusion and mistrust. The spy in question supposedly created the "cicadas" a long-buried network of Russian assets just waiting to spring to life and cause chaos. It is up to River Cartwright to infiltrate a small English village to try and uncover the truth. Luckily nothing can go wrong in a sleepy little village, or can it?
While all of this is happening there is a second story involving the visit to London of a Russian oligarch. Spider Webb is keen to turn the Russian to his advantage, but keen to keep things at arms length for deniability reasons. Webb enlists two of the slow horses to help, Min Harper and Louise Guy. Neither realise that Webb is using them to protect his own credibility, instead, they see the job as a possible route back into the heart of MI5.
There are lots of twists and quite a few shocking moments. As usual, people take Jackson Lamb for granted, little realising that he is usually a couple of steps ahead of them. Despite being a spy thriller this story really is character-driven. Each member of Slough House is given a chance to show their skills and personality, particularly Catherine Standish and Roddy Ho. Standish is an excellent foil for Lamb, who seems to be even more disgusting than in the first book. We also get to meet a couple of new members of the team, and I use the word team loosely since all of the younger members of Slough House are looking out for themselves.
The pace of both stories never lets up. As the tension builds the lives of some of the characters are at risk. From reading the first book in the series I'm aware that characters are expendable so the trepidation as I read on was real. It becomes a race against time as both stories reach their explosive conclusions.
Author Details
Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, two CWA Daggers, been published in twenty-five languages, and are the basis of a major TV series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He is also the author of the Zoë Boehm series, and the standalone novels Reconstruction and This is What Happened. Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.
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