If you live with other people, or have members of your pod stopping by while you're reading, you might want to warn them that you'll be reading the next Mick Herron "slow horses" espionage delight — the people in my living space kept showing up with the bewildered question, "You're reading a spy novel and you're laughing out loud??"
SLOUGH HOUSE builds on the escapades and character revelations of the previous books, and it's even funnier and, ironically, more heart-breaking if you've read the other titles (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and Joe Country). But it's still an excellent and compelling read if you plunge into it as your first visit to "Slough House," the building and department where MI5 dumps its staff failures. An alcoholic, a dance-crazy coke addict, a brilliant hacker with an ardent fantasy life involving how "hot" he is, a despairing staffer who'd been framed for pedophilia (guess how fast his fiancée left him), and the espionage-born-and-bred River Cartwright himself, in some ways the straight man among these various delightful nut cases. Most of all, the department circles around its head of operations, Jackson Lamb, a deceptively fat and farting slob whose skills in espionage, sorting out international intrigue, and even attacking the opposition physically are far better than those of his treacherous superior, Diana Taverner.
Here's a classic moment as the team waits for Lamb to show at a planned meeting:
A door banged, not the one from the yard, but the toilet on the floor below. So Lamb had floated in and up several flights of stairs without fluttering a cobweb on the way. It was unnerving to picture him doing this, like imagining a tapir playing hopscotch. The smell of stale cigarettes entered the room a moment before him, and the slow horses made way for it, then Lamb, by shuffling to either side. He arrived among them shaking his head in wonderment. "What a dump."
... He threw himself into his chair, which, one happy day, was going to respond by disintegrating into a hundred pieces. "Sorry to keep you waiting. I was up late comforting a gay American dwarf."
It's quickly evident that only Lamb, despite his crude language and behavior, would have noticed and listened to the story of that American, who had showed up unexpectedly in a room full of ex-spies who were saying goodbye to an old-time espionage meeting place being closed down.
That attentiveness to small details that in fact reveal Russian operations in Britain is half of what Lamb excels at; the other important half is the way he shepherds his group of failed spies, people who can't be easily fired because they know too much, but can be corralled where they may not hurt serious business. Lamb's robust verbal abuse and bluntness feel humiliating, but also give the staff a focus beyond their own misery.
Besides, Diana Taverner, head of MI5, has already done something far more humiliating to the "slow horses" department: set them up as targets for her own spies-in-training. Her mistake here is underestimating how far Lamb will go in response, to defend his bizarre team. But she's got problems, and would be the first to admit it: For Diana, "it turned out that the actual cost of having someone whacked remained one of those subjects too embarrassing to discuss in public, so that wasn't subjected to intense scrutiny either." And having set this up, funded by political forces she's misunderstood, Diana is in a serious mess ... and trying to pass the dirt downhill to Jackson Lamb's department. As she soon discovers, "that was the thing about shit, real or fake: once you'd begun spreading it about, it never ended up precisely where you wanted it."
Herron's espionage is highly realistic and well salted with views of the ridiculous — expect sudden guffaws or long laughs. (Good treatment for pandemic-induced depression.) Ironically or inevitably, it's also strung around some bizarre forms of love and loyalty in action. Plus Herron provides a crystal-clear view of modern British politics and even the American disaster. All of this makes SLOUGH HOUSE far more than a good read. It's worth reading twice, shelving, and pulling out again a few months later. Where else are you going to have so much fun while isolated and waiting for your vaccine? (Don't answer that. Listen to Jackson Lamb instead.)
PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.
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