• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2021 January #1
  *Starred Review* Herron returns to the dead-end gang from Slough House, where discredited MI5 spies go to molder, except this time the moldering process has been kicked up a notch. The slow horses, as the Slough House crew is called inside MI5, have been wiped from the agency's records, leaving them officially dead. To heap insult upon injury, a Russian hit squad appears to be in London, charged inexplicably with assassinating both past and present slow horses. Why bother? The answer starts with organizational muddle on an epic scale but quickly leads to a richly spiced goulash of corruption whose ingredients include Brexit, the British populist uprising (featuring a Boris Johnson–like politician on the make), and an assortment of power-hungry media types and MI5 honchos. But don't forget the slow horses, who, in fact, aren't all that slow, except when it comes to following rules. Led by the uproariously foul-mouthed, fractured-allusion-spewing Jackson Lamb, the Slough House losers can shoot straight when they need to, though they can't always avoid collateral damage. Combining some of the cleverest dialogue in the genre with unexpected bursts of violence, Herron brings to the spy novel—not known in the post-Bond era for its sense of humor—an Elmore Leonard–like ability to make us laugh and cry almost simultaneously. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of the Slough House espionage series, four Oxford mysteries, and several standalone novels. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.