Slough House, where failed MI6 agents are sent to carry out their careers at the bottom of the barrel. however, none of these agents joined the force to sit on the backburner. I enjoyed the idea of this story more than the actual story. I found there were many sub plots going on at once which made it hard to keep up. however, each individual book in this series does seem appealing so I am willing to try the next one.

Thank you the Hachette Australia for a free copy of this novel in exchange for an unbiased review. I'm sorry it took so long for me to read it.

I don't read a lot of spy thrillers, but the language and writing style got me hooked right from the start. It's obviously written by someone with intelligence (do you see what I did there) and an eye for human frailty. The Slow Horses are MI5 agents who've stuffed up and been exiled to Slough House in the hopes, they believe, that they'll get so bored with only being given drudge work they'll quit and the agency won't have to worry about them any more. But it turns out there might be more to it than appears on the surface.

Mick Horan has constructed a multi-layered story of deception and created a cast of characters who aren't your usual infallible automatons who go about the business of spying and saving the world with nary a scratch. Nobody is who they seem to be at first glance. Everyone has good and bad traits, but we always know why people do what they do, and that results in an intriguing and and absorbing story that'll raise your heart rate and keep you turning the pages until the very end.

I look forward to reading the subsequent five novels in the Slough House series.

4.5 stars. Slough House is where spies go when they've screwed up. Badly. For some, it was as small a thing as leaving a disk, with confidential data on it, on a train. For others, it might be an addiction, or simple shiftlessness. It's the place where they send you when they can't fire you outright, but want you to be miserable enough to quit on your own. Unfortunately for a British/Pakistani youth who has been kidnapped by fascists who threaten to live stream his execution, the denizens of Slough House may be his best, and only, chance or survival.

Suffice to say that I went out and bought the all the available published books that is how much I loved these books in the "Slough House" series.

A breath of fresh air in the noirish espionage genre - for there are certainly elements of noir in Jackson Lamb, our anti-hero and Cold War leftover.

A meandering story the leaves you wondering where you will end up - and not always at the conclusion you think you are heading towards.

I would love to see this as a TV series!

A solid spy thriller - good for a read when you're looking for an escape from the daily grind. Loved the dry humour and premise. Once the action kicks in, it really flies along.

A great story, peopled with a unique & memorable set of characters. Fast-paced, solidly plotted and just a little different. A fun, enjoyable read.

I am sorry to the author and publishers but I did not finish this book. I could not find it in myself to waste any more time on this read. I love spy novels and I love London even more. So the setting for the novel was perfect for me as a reader. However, this read was as enjoyable as watching the paint dry or getting stuck in melted asphalt.
There were too many characters to keep up with. The narration was too prescriptive. The dynamics of the event was way too slow.
I do not think I will return to this author.
Sorry

What a great spy story.

It had all the intrigue, dark characters, twisted plot and sinister background that a good spy novel had.

Looking forward to reading more form Mick Herron.

Not my usual reading genre but its always nice to try something new!
I'm not a James Bond fan and thankfully the protagonist Jackson Lamb is no James Bond!
The writing style is quite unique so it will be the kind of book that you will take to or not, not much middle ground for me anyway!
The series of books are entered around a group of outcast MI5 spooks who have been relegated to pen pushers and office workers due to botched carers. Reject spooks versus the real thing!
But looks can be deceiving and Jackson Lamb proves that he shouldn't be underestimated!
With humour throughout and some interesting characters it makes for a quick entertaining read

Seeing a lot of great reviews from my Goodreads friends regarding this series enticed me to download the first book. Unfortunately it just didnt grab me at all and I DNF at 25%.

4-stars and a bit. You can tell from the start that this is going to be good. Herron is a good writer, and this is the first in his "Slough House" (Slough as in "Ow!"). This is Quality writing. Fewer than one book in ten that I read is this good. Lots of worthwhile quotes below...

As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.

From the start, there is a very "Le Carré" feeling here, a feeling of wrecked lives in situations and characters. If you screw up in a British military or government organisation, especially one under budget or personnel stress, you can be exiled and your career abused forever. The disgraced agents are sent to Slough House, a name to humiliate them, and they are called "Slow Horses" to rub it in.


--

The head of the Slough House exiles is Jackson Lamb, an exile himself, and the stories of the Slow Horses is presented in bits and pieces. Lamb himself is a "secret" badass, once a true-warrior, faded and fat and physically unsavoury. We learn that he's even now a wolf in sheep's clothing, a "joe" from the "old school" Cold War days.

River Cartwright has screwed up, or possibly not, but the wheels of power have laid the blame on him anyway. He is exiled now, and forever, to the worst jobs of MI5, buried alive in Slough House ...

Half of the future is buried in the past. That was the prevailing Service culture. Hence the obsessive sifting of twice-ploughed ground, attempting to understand history before it came round again. The modern realities of men, women, children, wandering into city centres with explosives strapped to their chests had shattered lives but not moulds. Or that was the operating wisdom, to the dismay of many.

River and Sidonie working a typical, terrible job, sorting through old bags of street garbage ...

‘Are you going to clear this mess up?’ said Sidonie.
River said, ‘When’d you ever hear of a joe being sent out solo? Domestic, I mean. Middle of London.’ This amused her.
‘So now I’m a joe?’
‘And how come Lamb’s running an op off his own bat?’
‘You’d have to ask him. I’m going for coffee.’
‘You’ve already had coffee.’
‘Okay then. I’m going somewhere else until you’ve got rid of all this crap.’
‘I haven’t written it up yet.’
‘Then I’ll be gone a while. The gloves suit you, by the way.’
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Unhooking her bag from her chair, she left.

River escaped prison and censure, due to his grandfather's legendary spymaster skills...

His grandfather was the soul of discretion, or so he liked to think; imagining that a lifetime’s sealed lips had left him close with a secret.This belief persevered despite the evident truth that he liked nothing better than Service gossip. Maybe this was what age did, thought River. Confirmed you in your image of yourself even while it unpicked the reality, leaving you the tattered remnant of the person you’d once been.

River considers his old "friend", Spider Webb, who's gone on to better things, while River thinks about the training they both received not so long ago...

[Torture] Resistance techniques were taught slowly. Things had to be broken down before being built up again. Breaking down happened best in darkness. When you’d been through that, you wanted to be near others who’d been through it too. Not because you needed to talk about it, but because you needed your need not to talk about it to be shared by those you were with.

Wow, chapter 4, the presentation of Catherine as a character, faded and semi-tragic, is fabulous stuff... Truly wonderful. This is amazing prose, heartfelt. I'm impressed.

The introduction of the Slow Horses continues with losers Min, Louisa, Jed, and Roderick, and although good prose and well-presented, it's perhaps too many characterisations for a single chapter.

The brutal, right-wing kidnappers call themselves "The Voice of Albion", Blake's mythical name for Britain. It's worth reading about Blake's mythology...
Albion (Blake)

"Lady Di" Taverner, "Second Desk" at MI5, thinks about the kidnapped, condemned boy on TV ...

Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself –it likes the echoes its wingbeats make.

River and Sidonie on a stakeout...

Sid wore black jeans and hooded sweater. Tradecraft, but she looked good in it. She’d pushed the car seat back and was mostly in shadow, but every so often her eyes picked up light from a nearby streetlamp and threw it in his direction. She was thinking about him. When a woman was thinking about you, it was always either a good thing or a bad thing.


--
.

Two right-wing scumbags meet up... Does this remind you of the dangerous buffoon, Boris "me-first" Johnson?

Fluffyhaired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations –Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! –[clown Boris] had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-aquote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) .... but by and large [clown Boris] seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle.

Here, Herron more or less calls Johnson a Nazi traitor, via the right-wing journalist who tells "Boris" -
"Because we both know the tide’s turning. The decent people in this country are sick to death of being held hostage by mad liberals in Brussels, and the sooner we take control over our own future, our own borders ... ... You’re PM material. With you at the helm, this country can be great again."


--
.

Lamb considers the two possible "flavours" of the betrayal he faces ...

If Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse. Moscow rules had been written on the streets, but London rules were devised in the corridors of Westminster, and the short version read: someone always pays. Make sure it isn’t you.

This is an impressive first book of the series. The pacing is good in the first half book, and superb and compelling in the second half. Very hard to put down once the fuse is lit. Some chapters are a bit uneven, some plot twists are a bit strained, and the overall plot is a bit too fantastic for anything other than spy noir entertainment.

And, sadly, the culmination is a bit clumsy, a bit of an info-dump, sadly unsatisfying, and clearly sets up for future books in the series. This would only be 3 stars if not for the very good prose throughout.

At first I thought it was a bit of a plod however once I got to grips with all the characters (there are quite a few) and got a feeling how they all interacted I enjoyed this book. You need to keep reading. It is a new and individual take on the spy novel that is for sure ! River Cartwright and his slow horse colleagues are the intelligence service who have at some point or another screwed up, as far as we can tell they all pretty much dislike each other and do what they can for a quite life waiting for the moment that they either resign or die ! There is enough in this one read for me to want to see what happens next with this crew so I for one will be picking up the next book.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read this - the views are entirely my own

I realised, on starting this that I have already read the fourth book in this series (Spook Street) for the Amazon Vine review programme. I'm glad I've finally read the first book, as the stories of the characters develop through each book in the series and Spook Street makes more sense now, and I will definitely re-read it in the correct order. I loved this book. I love books about London, and London features pretty heavily, almost as a character in its own right. This is a spy thriller, in the John Le Carre, Smiley tradition, but more contemporary, which is very welcome. It's very much character driven. All the Slow Horses are MI5 operatives who have, in some way blotted their copy books. The first book sets about introducing them and mining into their pasts to show why and how they ended up working for the reprobate, Jackson Lamb, a surly slob who seems to hate his job and his staff. The plot in this book seems almost secondary to the character development, although it is pacy, well written and full of tension. Herron works hard to make the plot gel with the characters so each development dovetails into driving the plot forward and letting the characters unfold. The story about manipulation of social media, right wing pressure groups, dirty politicians and terrorism seems more pointed now than it did a few years ago when this book was first published, and I can see why it's getting a re-release.

At last I have found a spy novel that lives up to the hype. I enjoyed the way the plot gradually unfolds alongside the back story of less than perfect spooks, known as the Slow Horses. Head of them all is Jackson Lamb. He is not James Bond or George Smiley but he did grow on me.
Impatient now to read the next one.

What a great book, and start to a series. I was invited to download the five books in this series for free by NetGalley, as the last one is being released now. One of my GR friends has done the same and gave it a rave review - and I have to agree. I don’t normally read spy novels, but really enjoyed this: Jackson Lamb is a brilliant character and I loved the sly writing style, clues scattered into the plot to be retrieved just at the right moment.

Slough House is a London branch of MI5, where nothing happens because all the occupants are in some way in disgrace - so called Slow Horses. River Cartwright ended up there after a major stuff up, for which he blames his former friend and fellow trainee Spider Webb. River would have lost his job apart from the fact that his grandfather was an important agent with the service who still has influence, so instead spends his time doing mundane tasks with no apparent purpose.
When a young British Asian man is kidnapped and threatened with beheading live on the Internet, River sees links to his most recent assignment and the Slow Horses are drawn in to the attempt to find him, but other forces are at work to stop them.

I think I will be hurrying through the next four of these very soon, and am pleased to have found a new author whose clever black humour reminds me a little of Christopher Brookmyre, although much more subtle.

5★
“Always, in railway stations, there was this sense of pent-up movement. A crowd was an explosion waiting to happen. People were fragments. They just didn’t know it yet.”

This is not only spooks and spies and intrigue (and it definitely is all that), it is very funny and entertaining! It’s also a wonderful combination of old school sleuthing and networking and never burning bridges (well, not completely) and brave-new-world technology like CCTV mobile (cell) phones and database hacking. All wrapped up in some delicious writing like this.

“. . . the grey isn’t grey but black with the stuffing knocked out of it.”

and

“. . . she turned to find him reaching for her arm. The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man. ‘Not a good time, Roger.’”

There are lots of characters, and I’ll admit I had to backtrack a few times to remember who Hobbs and Hobden and Ho were, but I got the hang of it soon enough. Ho is the computer geek of the slow horses.

“Ho was usually first in, often last out, and how he spent the hours between was a mystery to River. Though the cola cans and pizza boxes surrounding his desk suggested he was building a fort.”

And there did need to be a bunch of characters since some were stationed in the real headquarters, Regent Park, and our “heroes” are the spies who’ve been relegated to a pre-retirement holding pattern in Slough House. Slough rhymes with cow in British English (or with bough as in the bough that will break in the rock-a-bye-baby lullaby, but I digress). Close enough to house to make Slow Horse a kind of rhyming slang nickname that is their “department”. (Americans will have to make a mental adjustment not to hear slough as sloo. But I digress again.)

Pre-retirement is what the government intends this place to be — a job so boring and demoralising that people will retire, saving the embarrassment of being sacked. Sometimes it works that way, sometimes not. So far, nobody’s ever been promoted back up the ranks, though. They are located in a less-than-desirable area in an old building.

“The front door, as stated, lurks in a recess. Its ancient black paintwork is spattered with roadsplash, and the shallow pane of glass above betrays no light within. An empty milk bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it to the pavement.”

Got it? If you’re a slow horse, this is your lot. There are many reasons the men and women there have been demoted, and we learn early that River Cartwright (so named by his rebellious mother) was saved from being sacked outright because of the OB, or the Old Bastard, as River fondly refers to his mother’s father, who raised him and in whose footsteps he's chosen to follow.

River is still close to his grandfather, who was a spook of some renown, and it’s his reputation that stands between River and the door.

“Without this connection, River wouldn’t have been a slow horse, he’d have been melted down for glue.”

The boss of all of these losers is Jackson Lamb, and there is no love lost between Lamb and any of his underlings.

“Lamb’s laugh wasn’t a genuine surrender to amusement; more of a temporary derangement. Not a laugh you’d want to hear from anyone holding a stick.”

During a meeting, River contemplates what he’d really like to do.

“River had measured the distance between Lamb’s chair and the window. That blind wasn’t going to offer resistance. If River got the leverage right, Lamb would be a pizza-shaped stain on the pavement instead of drawing another breath;”

The main story is a kidnapping with a video circulating of a young man, head covered by a hood, being threatened with being beheaded in 48 hours. There is a disgraced journalist who seems to be involved in some dodgy activities, and the powers-that-be want to know what he’s doing. Some of the slow horses are surprisingly involved in an actual operation for once in a very long time, but things don’t work out all that well.

When the action heats up, and I start thinking to myself “How did she get in there? Where did the gun come from? How did they spot him?” Herron switches back to a previous scene which explains it. It’s done so easily and subtly that it doesn’t interrupt the action, but it makes it very satisfying to feel that there are no loose ends.

I loved it and have already started Dead Lions, #2 in the series, so many thanks to NetGalley for the copy from which I’ve quoted and to Hachette Australia who have reissued the first five in the series before #5 is published on February 13.

Excuse me now while I go back to catch up with the slow horses and their old-word expertise and new-world tech! (I should add that this can be enjoyed as a stand-alone without needing to follow up.)

Sorry I couldn't get into this. There were too many characters and I wasn't interested in any of them!

Thank you Netgalley and Soho Crime for the eARC.
Normally spy fiction is not my cup of tea, but after reading so many enthusiastic reviews I decided to download the series. And am I glad I did!
At first it took a while to get into the flow of the book, but soon I was hooked. The MI5 has-beens of Slough House, who all ended up being dumped there after making massive blunders, are actually quite interesting and when put to the test, they don't disappoint. Underestimate them at your peril. Jackson Lamb, their head, is an odious man, who dislikes his team (and is hated by them), but together they manage to come up on top (sort of).
Personally, I love Jackson, in all his rude, sloppy, farting, armpit smelling glory. To me he's a great character and may become my hero...
I have Dead Lions waiting for me and can't wait to start reading this next in what will probably become a favorite series!

Well I have to give this book five stars because I read it in one day when I should have been doing other things, and now I really want to move straight into book 2

Not just another mystery/thriller, Slow Horses is totally original in style and content. The main characters are apparently a bunch of losers and misfits which made it all the more exciting when they tried to pull together and achieve something. And of course from the reader's perspective it was anyone's guess if and when they were ever going to win.

River Cartwright (yes, there were lots of jokes about his first name) managed to be a very appealing lead character and I hope he features in subsequent books. His boss, Jackson Lamb, is also more than meets the eye and is well versed in coming out on top regardless of events around him.

This book is clever, funny, well paced and always interesting. I believe I have found myself another good series!

I liked this book, it was a fun read. Some of the language is so colloquial that it took me a while to catch on.
The story is about a group of spies that have been shuffled off to a building and work because they have all screwed up big time, but for some reason can't be fired.
They are all pretty miserable and feel, justifiably, sidelined, even if their crimes don't seem to warrant that severe punishment.
A horrible racial crime is about to take place and in attempting to intervene. all sorts of people are revealed to be not what they seem.
The events are pretty predictable however some of the revelations are satisfying. There is redemption.
The structure of the book and the way the sections are organized can be a little challenging until you recognize the style and the clues that will tell you the end of each section.
This is the first of a series, so hopefully I will find the rhythm of the author in the next books.