A top-notch thriller with excellent dialogue. It's not really a complaint, but I saw the TV series first and it is very true to the book. ( )

Excellent story, twists, pace, characters and writing; but editing seems non-exist... ( )

Bitty disjointed switching between several unlikeable characters from start to finish, but overall eventually an element of tension creeps in. Slow, but differently so, compared to classics like Le Carre.

There isn't really a hero as such - except perhaps the boy Hassan, who is mostly an innocent victim. Rivers is the first name encountered and as such takes on the readers empathy. Slough House (not in Slough, but in london) is an outpost of MI5, and the team who are sent there are those the Service can't sack directly, but who have blotted their copybook so badly that they're not trusted with anything important. Instead they're expected to quietly resign, but some through shear bloody mindedness and perversity, turn up to work every day instead. The house is run by Lamb, unpleasant but still capable. Even MI5 suffers from budget restraint, and so very occasionally the Slow Horses are borrowed by MI5 proper for errands. One such is the intermittent surveillance of a former journalist, now turned right wing hack. Even the monotony of this is better than counting paperclips, but everything is forgotten when some Right Wing extremists post a live video threatening to kill a young Muslim that they've captured. Some in Sough House have their suspicions about exactly why they're being sent on errands just now, but it's mostly interspersed by selfishness and petty jealosy.

Really slow, but ends well, and just about worth persevering with - staggered it got made into a TV series though! I will probably read the 2nd and see if they improve at all. ( )

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/slow-horses-mick-herron ( )

"You know what?" Hassan said. "You make me ashamed I'm British."

That line speaks volumes.

I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy of Mick Herron's Real Tigers earlier this year, and I say fortunate because I was completely unaware of the author and I absolutely loved the book. So when I recently found Slow Horses (2010) it definitely made my day.

Mine is a Tenth Anniversary copy (2020), and the preface is interesting in itself. It briefly covers the inspiration for and / or the circumstances that conspired to create Slough House, and the events leading Herron to switch gears in his writing genre and to undertake more global political and unpleasant criminal themes like terrorism (yes, beheadings are extremely hardcore). It also mentions the pushback he got after he wrote this story:

"My original UK publisher took exception to the book; he thought its plot strand concerning the resurgence of the far right ridiculously unlikely, and references to, for instance, Britain leaving the European Union revealed how out of touch I was with contemporary politics. I, on the other hand, thought I'd found my own voice at last; not entirely different from the one I'd developed in the earlier books, but more confident, more individual. Being dropped by that publisher shortly after Slow Horses appeared wasn't the most auspicious of starts, but I felt at last that I was ready."

Funny that, since Fascism and the so-called "far-right" (or simply political right) has always been hiding in plain sight. In most places the far-right has largely been the sole power structure and authority held in place by its ardent supporters. The far-right has always controlled the message, and any failures to see the obvious is the fault of the viewer which is mostly due to holding a full set of false beliefs (hence, the message). I do like that the far-right is more mainstream and out of the shadows, I like that we now have facts (for the political center and so-called "left") and alternative-facts.

[Hard to believe, but the Hippies don't really run Canary Wharf, the Square Mile, or Lombard Street. They don't even run Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds or NatWest. Nor do they control UBS and Credit Suisse. The Hippies don't even control the Giant Media Conglomerates. Crazy, I know, but it’s true!]

Mick Herron’s writing is superb and sublime. There will be passages that say next to nothing, where you have to literally read between the lines, and I'll be like... huh, what? I will have to read the passage a couple of times before I put the pieces together and then... son of a bitch! By saying less, he was actually saying more and it's brilliant. I'm not sure how he does it, but that is real genius.

I love all the characters in Slough House. I also like smart people. I really, really like smart people... maybe because they are in such short supply. And I love the idea of Slough House, a crew of misfits that are polar opposites of the "London Rules" wonks overpopulating Regent's Park. How on any given day, with fewer tools and resources, the Slow Horses can run circles around their more upstanding counterparts. Black sheep, slow horses, whatever, I'll take them any day. ( )