London Rules by Mick Herron

 

A group of terrorists are hell-bent on destabilising the country and the slow horses are dragged into the mess when one of their own becomes a target for the terrorists. 

London Rules by Mick Herron is book 5 in the Slough House/Slow Horses series. I'm still reeling from the events at the end of book 4, Spook Street, and so are the washed-up MI5 agents who work at Slough House. 

The opening reads like a war film set in a third-world country as a group of armed men wreak havoc on a small village. The descriptions are so evocative that you could imagine yourself watching from the sidelines in a sand-strewn location with the sun blazing down on you. It's the penultimate word in the chapter that brings you up short and has you re-reading the whole thing again.

Events quickly switch to Slough House and a near miss for Roddy Ho. Thanks to the quick reflexes of Shirley Dander he narrowly misses being involved in a hit and run. Dander is convinced that the attack was deliberate but no one else at Slough House can believe that Ho can have done anything even remotely worthy of being targeted.

Subsequent events prove them all wrong. The big question is why would someone single out Roddy Ho? Fans of the series won't be surprised to learn that most of this goes straight over Ho's head, he's as delusional as ever and all loved up to boot.

The team has to work together to uncover who is out to get Ho and find the link to random attacks set on destabilising the country, all without the bosses at MI5 HQ discovering what they are up to. Teamwork isn't something the slow horses are used to, particularly with a couple of them being extremely unpredictable. Shirley Dander undergoes a lot of personal growth in the novel but is still as unstable as ever and JK Coe is still a complete unknown.

London Rules treads a fine line between thriller and comedy, if you enjoy your humour on the sarcastic side then you are in for a treat. Jackson Lamb is even more disgusting than ever but his brilliance still outshines everything his bosses try to throw at him. Thankfully, Catherine Standish is back at Slough House to act as Lamb's moral compass, although that's not an easy thing to do.

The pace is non-stop as the team tries to outwit the terrorists and protect their own reputation, all the while the reader knows that no one at Slough House is ever safe. As the dust settles I'm already looking forward to the next book in the series, Joe Country, but know that brings me a step closer to having completed the series.

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 Nobody Walks and The Secret Hours. Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.