Book Number 7 in the Slough House series (unfortunately I thought it was book number 2)
Slough House – the blurb
Slough House – the crumbling office building to which failed spies, the ‘slow horses’, are banished – has been wiped from secret service records.
Reeling from recent losses in their ranks, the slow horses are worried they’ve been pushed further into the cold, and fatal accidents keep happening.
With a new populist movement taking a grip on London’s streets, the aftermath of a blunder by the Russian secret service that left a British citizen dead, and the old order ensuring that everything’s for sale to the highest bidder, the world’s an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.
But the slow horses aren’t famed for making wise decisions.
Skip to the end
I’d read Slow Horses, the first in this series, sometime ago and had kept an eye out for book 2 since. In a fit of I don’t know what (I’m very nearly 40, perhaps it’s old age) I nabbed Slough House from a charity shop. Brilliant I thought to myself that’s book 2 lets get stuck in. Except Slough House is not book 2, Dead Lions is book 2 and THIS book is book 7. I somehow had managed to skip 5 books in the series. Epic fail!
Well it wasn’t entirely. Yes there were parts that I couldn’t quite fit remember or piece together but like every good series writer the book can be read alone or out of order. You just don’t get the whole experience you were intended to. Jackson Lamb is still very much Jackson Lamb, if anything maybe a little less present? His team are still very much the collected group of misfits. I did struggle to place each character, not finding them totally rounded out to really grasp on to but it’s Herron’s writing style that really carries the book. I love the sarcasm and in this one the references to the Russian spy poisoning that we all still very clearly remember. It’s how very possible Jackson Lamb and his bunch of misfits could be that is the enthralling part.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for Dead Lions and only hope I don’t suddenly stumble across Joe Country or the like and mistake that for my next read in the series. If I were a spy, I’d definitely end up in Slough House.