Mick Herron

Easily one of the smartest and most creative espionage books I've ever read. I tried this mid-series book because I'd watched a couple of seasons of the Apple film version and loved the fringe characters who populate the book, especially the foul-mouthed, odiferous Jackson Lamb. Always Leary of a book that is so well fitted for the screen, I was very pleasantly surprised that the film version captured the characters nicely - Lamb just smells worse and acts worse in the book versions, and the misfits fit worse, too. The plot doesn't matter one whit, though it's smart and creative. But these characters could enter a robot building contest and I'd be back for more. If you watched the series, I promise you'll like the unfettered version of Lamb and his crew of miscreants. This book single handedly convinced me to clear the shelf where le Carre sits.

Highly Recommended!!!!!
5 bones!!!!!… (more)

I like a good spy thriller from time to time. Usually the ones I've read have dealt with the Cold War times but this one is more contemporary. I gather this series has now been made for streaming TV which accounts for its popularity in my local library. I see it is available through Hoopla so maybe this will be our evening viewing.

Who knew that MI5 housed its lackluster spies in a special division? That's what Slough House is and the men and women who operate out of it are the Slow Horses. River Cartwright doesn't feel like he belongs at Slough House because the operation he botched (which was a training exercise) resulted from incorrect information from another operative. However, his boss, Jackson Lamb, tells him he was lucky not to be outright dismissed and it's only due to the fact that his grandfather was a master spy in his time. All of the operatives at Slough House just want to get back into doing real spy work. Spending a rainy night outside of a journalist's flat waiting for him to put out his trash doesn't quite qualify as that for River. At the same time, his office mate, Catherine Standish, gets a real job stealing data from that same journalist's thumb drive without him catching on. River is jealous and determined to find out why the journalist has been targeted. Then, events in Britain take a horrific turn when a young Muslim man in kidnapped in Leeds and his kidnappers threaten to cut off his head on a streaming platform. All hands are needed to look for clues as to where the hostage is being held, even those at Slough House. They do a suprisingly good job arriving at the house where he was held just minutes after the captors were warned (by a mole in MI5) they had to abandon their safe house. When the Slough House group arrive they find a decapitated head on the kitchen table but it's not the hostage, it's a MI5 operative who had been under cover with the group. River thinks he looks familiar but their time at Slough House never overlapped. Where has he seen him before? When he remembers the revelation will shake up the highest levels of MI5.

This book was written before the Brexit vote but seems to have predicted that time of British isolationism. Now what else will Mick Herron prognosticate?… (more)