The plotting which did lead you by the arm into cul-de-sacs and dead ends before pulling the rug under your feet – and the denouement in the Cotswold village of Upshott was effective.

Lamb’s tempting Catherine to drink again was just cruel and unnecessary, a step too far for that particular characterisation.What happens when a high-level spy starts showing signs of dementia? If he's unable to keep old secrets, will someone take care of him for good? Rade Serbedzija as Nikolai Katinsky, a former KGB agent living in exile in London after defecting at the end of the Cold War. Wiseman, Andreas (11 April 2023). ""'Slow Horses' Season Four: Hugo Weaving, Joanna Scanlan & Ruth Bradley Among Cast To Join Gary Oldman In Apple Spy Series, Filming Underway" ". Deadline. Archived from the original on 11 April 2023 . Retrieved 11 April 2023. Standing by the Wall: The Collected Slough House Novellas (2022) - Includes all novellas in the Slough House series published as of 2022.

When former spook Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope passing between hands in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he's witnessed something important. When he relays those suspicions to a man who babysits retired spies, however, he sets off a chain of life-changing events. Although it says it right in the title, this is a novel about death and how we move past the loss of those that we care for or are responsible for. Or that maybe there is no moving on from losing someone? Do you take revenge or find some sort of acceptance with the new reality? In the end, Herron’s point seems to be that raging against the way things are does little long term good for yourself and nothing to help those whom you’ve lost. Easy to say, harder to do. One of his characters, Peter Judd, an unscrupulous, ambitious and amoral politician, seems strangely familiar. A quotation from the first book, Slow Horses, needs, I think, no further explanation: “With a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right … Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon ... but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle.” A decade and several novels on, Judd has graduated into a manipulative, cynical villain, happy to ally himself with the nationalist far right in his endless pursuit of personal power. Herron, as it happens, was a student reading English at Balliol College, Oxford, at the same time as Boris Johnson. Did you know the prime minister then, I ask? “I saw him once or twice in the junior common room. I wasn’t mixing in that kind of circle,” he says, drily. “I don’t think the Bullingdon Club opened its arms to northern comprehensive types, somehow.” Herron seems a little sheepish at the resemblance between the fictional PJ and the all-too-real BJ. “When I started,” he says, “I didn’t have a readership, so I could say what I liked and it didn’t matter.”Unfortunately, having secrets can be a very bad thing, even if you're that far down the spy ladder. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English. [1] [2] [3] Career [ edit ] Location of the fictional Slough House (Aldersgate Street, London) Dead Lions” was mostly successful on that front. It is an enjoyable story, and the characters that were established in that first book take some steps forward here. There are also some new characters introduced that show how easy it will be for Herron to freshen up the mix at Slough House as the series moves along. The new characters fit in well, and you get the sense there is more to them that will be explored in subsequent stories. There are also a few curveballs tossed into the narrative that raise the stakes of the game for all of the characters. I wont spoil anything except to say that while there is an element of humor to the story, it doesn’t mean there isnt real danger afoot.

Full of style and cynical humor . . . Has all the punch-your-lights-out action of a movie thriller.” A surreal, cynical, yet amusing look at the world of British intelligence . . . a looking-glass world that features KGB undercover agents, a Russian oligarch, a text message on a mobile phone and the ghost of a fabled Soviet spymaster who may not be real . . . an amusing, serpentine plot that takes readers as far from the glamorous world of Ian Fleming’s tuxedo-wearing spy as could be imagined.” If his marriage had been strong to begin with, he sometimes lectured himself, it would have survived his professional humiliation, but the truth, he’d come to understand, held a tighter focus. If he himself had been strong, he would have ensured that his marriage survived. As it was, his marriage was definitely a thing of the past, what with Louisa being on the scene. He was pretty sure Clare wouldn’t tolerate that particular development, and while he hadn’t told her about it, he wasn’t convinced she didn’t know. Women were born spooks, and could smell betrayal before it happened. Alongside this, Arkady Pashkin, a Russian oligarch, has been invited to talks by the slimy James “Spider” Webb in the Needle and he has seconded Harper and Guy to babysit him – a term that seems to mean both protect him and keep tabs on him – for those talks. It did not come as a huge surprise that these two plots were connected by the end of the novel, even if it felt just a little forced. In spite of their low status within the agency, the agents of Slough House will soon find themselves in the middle of something that threatens not just themselves, but all of MI5.This is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone – whether you are a fan of spy thrillers of not. The story line is good (though the revenge motivation given near the end maybe a tiny bit implausible) – but the convoluted and exciting plot is just the medium for some scintillating prose and a panoply of beautifully crafted characters. href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/5D9/AB3/D4/{5D9AB3D4-30A4-4647-91F7-5ECE27D2D0D0}Img150.jpg Herron (Down Cemetery Road, 2009, etc.) provides a dour, twisty spy thriller with something for everyone: part post–Cold War miasma, part James Bond heroics, and elliptical withal.

James “Spider” Webb – Schemer and dreamer who unrealistically sees himself climbing the ladder past many people much better at scheming than him. See “Diana Taverner”

Slough House, Book 6.5 | The Catch (Novella)

Lamb – I do feel I have to include him – there is much I dislike about him but he is also engaging and loyal when his team are threatened (by anyone other than himself) and yes he does, as The Guardian interview with Herron suggests, bear echoes of Falstaff, unlikeable but compelling in a horrible way. Before the Slough House series, he wrote the Zoë Boehm series. Each book in the series is loosely connected by the presence of PI Zoë Boehm. The books in this series are: