Challenging the tropes of the spy world, Mick Herron’s Slough House book series follows secret intelligence officers banished to desk work owing to bad behaviour. Dubbed “slow horses” by their peers, they’re prone to leaving top-secret documents on trains and chasing down the wrong bad guys.
The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010 – but it didn’t creep into the bestseller charts until years later. Herron has since penned eight more novels in the series, with the latest being released next week.
The series has reached a whole new audience thanks to the Apple TV+ adaptation starring Gary Oldman as the dishevelled, mildly alcoholic leader of Slough House, Jackson Lamb. Oldman stars in the show alongside Kristen Scott Thomas as MI5’s deputy director Diana Taverner and Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, an ambitious but naive field agent. Each season of the critically acclaimed show is based on a different book in Herron’s series, with season five dropping on 24 September.
The winning spy thriller formula follows disgraced, embarrassed and failed agents as they become accidentally embroiled in various espionage operations, high-profile assassinations and political conspiracies. The spy plots are as good as Ian Fleming’s or John Le Carre’s storylines, but the black comedy is as sharp as The White Lotus or The Studio.
The latest novel, Clown Town, picks up where the last tome left off. Cartwright is still sidelined from the field, Taverner is pulling political strings behind the scenes and Lamb is determined to expose career-ending MI5 secrets. Here’s everything you need to know.
Read the full Slough House series in order
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