Slow Horses

I loved this book because it’s about misfits. In this case, misfits who are spies. Spies who have screwed up and disgraced themselves and their masters at the British Secret Service. They’re led by the disheveled and malodorous Jackson Lamb, who is so smart he disdains everyone around him.

He and the Slow Horses get all the bad assignments, but I loved how each of them possessed special skills and a desire to redeem themselves. I think Mick Herron is the master of humorous spy fiction!  

I love how this book plays out almost entirely in London and solely in the UK. 

Everything in it reminds me of how great a city it is and how much I loved living there. There is always so much going on you wonder if there are spies around you!

During my early U.S. Secret Service days, I discovered something I wasn't expecting.

Secret Service agents were some of the most interesting and unusual people on the planet. Not because we were charged with a critical mission but because we came at it from many different backgrounds and directions. That's the brilliance of Herron's story.

There are many different people with many different personalities, all working toward the same goal. Some of the characters in this story reminded me of fellow Secret Service agents—even Jackson Lamb.

It’s easy to see why Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series was adapted for television. He’s a wonderful writer—his way of describing things is unique—his characters are memorable and quirky—his Jackson Lamb character is one-of-a-kind—I love his sense of humor, and the plots are tricky. It’s also nice to get the British take on the intelligence community as opposed to the usual books about the CIA. 

But if you read two, then this should be the second. Herron is not so moody as le Carré, but he is funnier and, perhaps, more cynical. Moreover, his main characters, “slow horses,” have been demoted to “Slough House,” to keep them out of the way of their smoother colleagues in the world of secret intelligence. There is something endearing about their repeated, disastrous, attempts to climb back up the ladder. Their leader, Jackson Lamb, a character worthy of le Carré at his most Dickensian, is always having to rescue them. 

Incredibly well written, refreshing the genre. How do you bring originality to the saturated genre of spy thrillers? Herron does this by developing a conceit based on a simple idea of ‘what do you do with your failed spies’?’ Then, he adds incredible visceral characters, all with damaged personalities and egos, not uncommon in the work of espionage, but he does so in an engagingly refreshing manner. He takes the familiar genre tropes and turns them on their head. The plot is complex and is a slow burn but worth the wait. Yet, at the end of the day, it’s… show more.

When my editor (Harvard University’s Randy Rosenthal) first read my debut novel, his feedback was that my characters lacked enough significant flaws. “Readers want to share common ground and empathize with the characters in your novel. No one ever fell in love with a perfect character.” Herron’s novel has abundant characters with egregious flaws. And those flaws do make them so very intriguing. The plot is thick with manipulation and humor. Perhaps the best spy thriller written in the last 20 years.