December 1, 2020
As if its tendency to self-destruct weren't efficient enough, the British establishment's last depository for spies too old, compromised, or incompetent to defend queen and country is under attack from every side. While the slow horses of Slough House gradually remove themselves from further embarrassment by dying off, their personal information is being methodically purged from government computers, except for the names and addresses that allow the survivors to keep getting paid. At the same time, someone who doesn't think they're dying fast enough has slimmed their rolls by executing veteran members Kay White and Struan Loy, reportedly as revenge for the killing of a murderous Russian agent on the orders of Diana Taverner, the First Chair at Regent's Park. In the face of slashed budgets, power-hungry politician Peter Judd offers Slough House an exemption from the funding cuts, but there's a catch: He expects them to invite millionaire news princeling Damien Cantor to a closer relationship than Jackson Lamb or any of his loyalists is comfortable with. Oh, and the money men Judd maintains he speaks for would "like you to ease off on your infiltration of the Yellow Vest movement." Just asking, of course, he smoothly assures Diana. One way or the other, it seems certain that somebody--the Russians, the accountants, the press, the Grim Reaper--is coming for regulars Louisa Guy, River Cartwright, Lech Wicinski, and Catherine Standish--not to mention Shirley Dander, whose partners have already displayed a disconcerting habit of dying in harness. Once again, Herron captures the dramedy of the battle between spies and bureaucrats better than anyone else on either side.
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Starred review from March 22, 2021
British author Herron’s superb seventh Slough House novel (after 2019’s Joe Country) opens with an unidentified woman’s assassination whose significance gradually becomes clear in this darkly satiric update on the “slow horses,” spies who have each made a colossal mistake and have been assigned to MI5’s Slough House, a kind of purgatory where they’ll spend “the rest of forever in a mist of thwarted ambition.” A taut, complex plot unfolds through a host of perspectives, including that of team leader Jackson Lamb, who’s callous, politically incorrect, but loyal to his “joes.” The slow horses are being tailed. Sid Baker, a former team member believed to be dead, reappears. Peter Judd, a highly unscrupulous political figure, tries to insinuate the private sector into MI5. And Putin’s Russia has “declared war on the British secret service.” Herron does a magnificent job keeping the assorted narrative balls aloft in a story that’s often gripping and even more often hilarious. This entry should garner him a slew of new American readers. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary. (U.K.)
Starred review from January 1, 2021
Herron returns to the dead-end gang from Slough House, where discredited MI5 spies go to molder, except this time the moldering process has been kicked up a notch. The ""slow horses,"" as the Slough House crew is called inside MI5, have been wiped from the agency's records, leaving them officially dead. To heap insult upon injury, a Russian hit squad appears to be in London, charged inexplicably with assassinating both past and present slow horses. Why bother? The answer starts with organizational muddle on an epic scale but quickly leads to a richly spiced goulash of corruption whose ingredients include Brexit, the British populist uprising (featuring a Boris Johnson-like politician on the make), and an assortment of power-hungry media types and MI5 honchos. But don't forget the slow horses, who, in fact, aren't all that slow, except when it comes to following rules. Led by the uproariously foul-mouthed, fractured-allusion-spewing Jackson Lamb, the Slough House losers can shoot straight when they need to, though they can't always avoid collateral damage. Combining some of the cleverest dialogue in the genre with unexpected bursts of violence, Herron brings to the spy novel--not known in the post-Bond era for its sense of humor--an Elmore Leonard-like ability to make us laugh and cry almost simultaneously.
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