Slow Horses
The Slough House series, Book 1
Mike Herron
Soho Crime
Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The agents of MI5 are among the world's best, protecting England from enemies foreign and domestic... but anyone can stumble, fumble, or run afoul of office politics. The ones who aren't bad enough to fire (or are too politically sensitive to let go) end up at Slough House, home of the department's misfits and screw-ups. It's officially said that Slough House offers a chance at reform, but in practice it's the last stop before resignation - and if they don't quit on their own, the "slow horses" are saddled with openly pointless and tedious assignments until they get the hint and leave. The only ones who hang around more than a few months are the ones too oblivious to realize the snub, or the ones too broken to care about anything anymore, even themselves.
River Cartwright was a bright up-and-comer in the agency until a fouled training exercise resulted in real-world problems. Only the fact that his grandfather was a legend in MI5 saved him from being sacked outright, but being reassigned to Slough House under the doughy, washed-up veteran Jackson Lamb isn't much better than a firing, and he knows it. Surrounded by fellow outcasts, River clings grimly to the thin chance of redemption, not willing to let himself believe that his career is over before it properly began. When a London teenager is abducted by an extremist right-wing group and threatened with an online beheading, he and the other Slough House misfits can only seethe at their ineffectiveness... but a series of managerial missteps instead lands the agents right in the middle of a massive departmental mess centered around the kidnapping - and if they can't unravel the tangled threads and figure out what's really going on, they'll be the ones thrown under the bus by a ruthless and desperate deputy-director.
REVIEW: Not subscribing to Apple+, I have not seen the streaming series inspired by this book, but I was intrigued by the concept. It turns out to be a decent spy thriller, if one that sometimes overplays its tension by drawing out reveals and twists (and has a few elements that subtly set my teeth on edge).
Opening with River and the botched training exercise that derails his career (ironically in the London Underground), it introduces Slough House almost as a character itself, a run-down edifice where the hopelessness and misery are baked into the peeling Formica and yellowed paint, full of agents who seem to be going through the motions of existing more out of habit than out of any remaining aspirations about their lives, let alone their dead-ended careers. River struggles to cling to his sense of purpose, even as some part of him recognizes the truth: he's only still drawing a paycheck because his retired grandfather's reputation still carries some weight at the MI5 headquarters in Regent's Park, and he is expected to be a good little agent and resign so none of the top brass have to ruffle feathers by firing an agent of his pedigree. He perseveres in no small part because he knows in his bones that he didn't mess things up on his own; his partner and best friend (or so he thought) fed him bad intel, seemingly sacrificing River to further his own career. Still, he has no idea how he'll clear his name from Slough House, when the head agent Lamb pretty much tells him point-blank that the gruntwork he's doing - sorting through the garbage of a disgraced investigative reporter - is not actually intended to accomplish anything but make him stink, in a literal and metaphoric sense. This being a thriller and not a depressing literary examination of broken lives, however, it goes without saying that the pointless case of shadowing said reporter turns out to be not so pointless after all. And when the teenager Hassan, a British-Pakistani boy, is snatched off the streets and featured in a livestream by the previously-obscure extremists group Sons of Albion, things heat up across the city and especially in Regent's Park. Can River and his fellow "slow horses" sit on the sidelines as they watch the clock tick down to the promised online beheading of an innocent kid? Even the most cynical denizen of Slough House was and still is an MI5 agent, whether they admit it or not, so it goes without saying that they dip their toes into the investigation... and even if they managed to abstain as they're technically supposed to, they find themselves drug in by the schemes of Deputy-Director Diana Taverner, an ambitious woman who wants to make a name for herself and is more than willing to throw a few of her own people - especially ones already tagged as departmental disgraces - to the wolves to do it. Thus begins a complex game of cat and mouse in a story with multiple cats and mice, some characters being both hunter and hunted at once (though they may not always realize which, if either, they are at the time).
For all that things mostly moved well (after a bit of a slow start), there were a few parts that rubbed a bit wrong, such as the way it was presented as inevitable that a woman in power would mess up a major operation, and how another was basically fridged after River found her attractive. Some of the characters of Slough House felt extraneous by the end, and I'm not sure why Herron bothered cluttering the cast with them. A few of the side stories stretched out overlong, becoming padding at more than one point. For all that, it does wrap up reasonably well, though I don't feel invested enough to continue the series (or pony up the cost of yet another streaming service to watch the show).
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