Another great book in the series about the MI5 cast-offs at Slough House. Mick Herron has a unique writing style that suits his characters.

Slough House is where spies who screw up get sent until the British security services figure out what else to do with them . But when a cashiered operative turns up and makes a scene at the funeral of former colleague, it's clear that his presence at the event is just a pretext -- but for what? Certainly not to see his ex-wife, but maybe to let his son, himself a Slough House resident, know that Dad is back in the game... and maybe never left
There's more political infighting among present and former spies than action in this thriller, but that won't deter fans of the series or its creator, who as usual turns in a well-crafted tale distinguished by multidimensional characters despite the rambling plot they're trapped in

Brilliant but baffling. If you’re new to the Slough House series then that’s your likely reaction to this, the sixth in the sequence of modern-day spook stories. Joe Country is not one of those dip-in, dip-out, ‘can be read as a standalone’ novels. Each book in the Jackson Lamb series is a chapter in an ongoing story, and starting in the middle will make no sense whatsoever.

The characters are lightly-drawn and hard to grasp, there’s a metric tonne of background to grapple with, and the shadow of an extremely sinister overall arc is only just starting to show itself. All that would mean nothing if you haven’t read the earlier books. So definitely don’t start here.

Likewise, if you’ve missed a couple of instalments then go back and fill in the gaps. You need to know who has survived and who has died; who’s been framed and who’s wrongly accused; which skeletons have come crawling out of MI5’s capacious cupboard; whose political star is in the ascendant, and who owes whom a sordid little debt. It also helps if you know what’s going on with that triple agent, and how deceptive and deadly Jackson Lamb can actually be.

Once you’ve got yourself up to date, let the fun begin. Author Mick Herron exquisitely exposes the sleazy side of the British establishment; landed gentry, politicians and civil servants alike. This book is so damn relevant that in a couple of years it may not make sense, but right now the acerbic references to Brexit, our current Prime Minister and her likely successor are snarkily on target. You’ll definitely laugh out loud but it’s kinda hard not to weep…

Herron usually showboats with at least one passage of superb stunt-writing – but not this time, which makes me wonder if Joe Country was written to a tighter deadline than its predecessors. His dialogue and description is as pithy as always; for instance, the relentless mockery of the IT geek who has zero self-awareness is wickedly enjoyable. Yet such is Herron’s skill that he sideswipes our expectations with bleak betrayal and bitter revelation when we least expect it – delivering his most poignant punches almost as an afterthought.

Joe Country works on many levels, then. There’s a self-contained story about a hapless whistleblower hiding out in the winter hills of rural Wales, being hunted by ruthless agents with only an off-duty member of the Slough House team to defend him. There’s caustic commentary on contemporary UK politics and social trends. There’s tonnes of tradecraft. There’s subtle character development which sees a couple of the regulars develop genuine credibility. And – as I mentioned earlier – there’s glimpses of a much bigger picture which threatens national security and many of the key players…

The next episode should be really interesting.

9/10

If you have read the previous five Slough House thrillers then you know what to expect.

Excellent writing, black humour, great plotting and characterisation and lots of tradecraft.

This one is well up to standard and the series show no signs of losing impetus.

All the old friends are there and I will just say that this is a must read for lovers of good, original spy thrillers.

Clearly I love this novel/series/author -- wrote an encomium about it/them/him for Zoomer magazine.
At first, it’s actually hard to resist the urge to stop every few pages and for posterity jot down the memorable turns of phrase. (Of a borrowed getaway ride: “The thing about someone else’s car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.”) Soon, though, the marked passages become too many — or as the Evening Standard put it, “Herron has read his Carl Hiaasen as well as his Charles Dickens....

Slough House is the Island of lost toys in London for disgraced MI5 spies. Various spy plots unfold with clumsy and cynical responses from the leaders of MI5 and Slough House. It was a little to dark with a little too much unhappy outcome for what I was looking for but others may well like it's "gritty realism".

‘Slough House’ is dirty; ‘Spook Street’: deadly. Now we have the duplicity of ‘Joe Country’ - perhaps the next stop for Mick Herron’s ‘Slow Horses’ will be a devious ‘Intelligence Continent’.

As it is, ‘Joe Country’ is a fine addition to the series. Few writers can weave such deft description and pacy plotting - garnished with lashings of humour and even dashes of pathos - as Herron and each novel builds to a crescendo in which the reader is left feeling both traumatised and hungry for the next instalment.

There’s little doubt that Herron is a confident writer at the top of his game. This series has become famous for its openings: Dickensian wanders through locations in an omniscient voice quite unlike other writers working today. Here, he sheds this trope, instead opting for a reveal different to the structure of the other texts.

His confidence has also been apparent for a while in his wanton profligacy with his characters. It must take iron nerves for a writer to dispose of such well-rounded, independent characters brimming with such vim and spark as these Slow Horses. And yet, here again, Herron is prepared to dispose of them with abandon. As in the old TV series Spooks (MI:5 in the US), no one is safe and this means no reader can ever truly relax that their favourite character won’t end up at the knackers yard in the next ten pages.

Finally, there is Jackson Lamb. A Rabelaisian grotesque, becoming progressively more grotesque by the novel. And, in truth, Lamb is actually my biggest quibble of this first rate book. He dominates the proceedings so completely that you pine for his nastiness when he is off stage. This is Banquo as central character, relegating Macbeth to bit part player by sheer force of personality (or blackened toe wiggling through undarned sock, if you will).

There are a few minor worries deriving from Lamb which I hope are me being hyper critical. He keeps “appearing” and “vanishing” like an obese Paul Daniels - or a less creepy David Blaine - and I hope this doesn’t signal either Lamb as supernatural entity or that Herron is now so successful that he has entered the realm of the uneditable: too grand for repetitions to be noted and corrected. I think not on the whole.

‘Joe Country’ is proof, if any were needed, that Herron stands at the pinnacle of the espionage genre, (possibly snug on the heights with Jeremy Duns and Charles Cumming). Others have already noted it is not a book which would reward readers unfamiliar with the series but for all that, I hope the Slow Horses have many more races left to run.

This is my favourite Mick Herron Slow Horses novel for a while - though I always enjoy them somehow this took me back to the first book. A whiz back comic funeral starts off the books with verve. One of the main series characters, River, has his rather extensive back story winnowed down to a single character, his father, and the majority of the books is the story of several of the women spies. Never predictable, always enjoyable. Catherine's reveal is also memorable.