Slough House

Herron's Slough House saga just goes from strength to strength. Slough House picks up where the previous novel, Joe Country, left off. The denizens of Slough House, the “Slow Horses”, have been wiped from the Service database, all records gone. Service chief Diana Taverner has, unbeknownst to them, been using them as a training exercise in surveillance for new recruits, much to Slough House slob-in-residence Jackson Lamb's annoyance.

But other actors are in play too. Disgraced former MP Peter Judd is pulling strings behind the scenes, weaving a web that will ensnare Taverner, advance his populist agenda and perhaps, just perhaps, return him to front line politics, or at least his chosen stalking horse, leader of the Yellow Vests, man of the people “Flinty”. And someone has passed a file to the Russians who now think they have the names of a Service hit squad and have sent their own assassins to liquidate them in revenge for a Service hit on their own turf. But the file only lists past Slough House personnel......

A superb espionage thriller, full of sardonic wit, pointed satire and brutal action, Herron's Slow Horses once again stumble through another adventure despite their own ineptitude and personal demons. Jackson Lamb is, if anything, even more disheveled and disgusting, and when someone thought long dead reappears, it's River Cartwright, one of the longest serving Slow Horses, who questions his future.

The ending is a cliffhanger of sorts, which I assume will be resolved in the next book. I for one, can't wait.

When you write a presumed dead character back into a series, it does make it a little more difficult to believe that you've truly killed off another character at the end of the same book. That being said, I can see where the author might feel he'd done everything he could with River Cartwright. Found out how he got framed, discovered the truth about his mother and father, brought the engaging motif of his grandfather the guardian and old spy to a close via dementia and death,brought the barely-hinted love interest back and alleviated guilt at her passing, made him actually appear to act on the idea of moving on with his life, in the face of multiple books making clear that no action taken from Slough House would get a person back into the good graces of the Park. If the audience is supposed to be rooting for Cartwright, his death is dismaying, but if that audience is looking for Cartwright's story to have a clear resolution, it doesn't get more resolved than death.

I feel like over the course of the series, the reader comes to understand that for the most part, Slough House is a rotating cast of characters, and while Catherine Standish and Jackson Lamb might come as a set, Cartwright is capable of being relegated to the background, and so bumping him off is not out of the realm of possibility. Still, spies and subterfuge, I'm not sure I trust the ending, less wishful thinking for a better ending for River, more a skepticism provoked by the series itself.

I'll admit this series hasn't really ever been character first for me. The ensemble cast of slow horses are discouragingly constant in their ability to make bad choices, and those that stay for multiple books are repellant for their own reasons, Roderick Ho is insufferable which no amount of satirizing his oblivious ego makes more endurable, River Cartwright is depressingly earnest with nothing to show for it, Jackson Lamb is offensive and Catherine Standish is grimly self-flagellating in her withstanding of Lamb's worst and her seeming inability to have anything in her life beyond her recognition that she is an alcoholic always a step away from relapse. What works so well in this series is the author's ability to write a taut tale of intrigue without falling into the breathlessly dramatic tropes of thrillers, always a web of dirty dealing unfolding with snappy dialogue and off colour banter (warnings for every type of casually prejudiced language you could imagine) , and always this glimmer of something greater when Lamb makes it clear that regardless of what else politicians, movers and shakers and members of the secret service are getting up to, you won't get one over on him, and you don't fuck with his joes. I think that's what makes it so distinct from the thriller subgenre I despise, and makes me curious about whether other spy novels work the same way, there is a thread of clever confident cat and mouse, not flailing about and panicking, and there are those attempting to keep to the side of law and order over chaos and corruption. I'm curious to see how Diana Taverner (an opponent that I'm now realizing the series couldn't really exist without) weasels her way out of the latest mess she's gotten herself into, and what Slough House looks like in the wake of River's fate. I could honestly see the next book being the last, which makes the fact that there's a new one scheduled to be published in the coming year particularly interesting. This is a series that I've stepped away from before; I could see doing so again depending on where the next book ends. That being said, the plot and pacing on show in this entry was spectacular, did not feel too dark/dismal, just sucked me right in. A very good series for a quick-paced tandem read, devouring the whole book in a day with the help of 2x audio.