Slow Horses
by Mick Herron
Summary
At the edge of London’s intelligence world lies Slough House, a drab office where MI5 sends agents who have made career-ending mistakes. Known as the “slow horses,” these disgraced spies spend their days drowning in paperwork, enduring humiliating assignments, and dreaming of returning to serious intelligence work. Their miserable existence is overseen by Jackson Lamb, a brilliant but abrasive veteran whose apparent laziness conceals a formidable understanding of the spying business.
River Cartwright, a promising young agent whose career collapses after a disastrous training exercise, finds himself among them. When a young man is kidnapped and his captors threaten to broadcast his execution online, the slow horses see an opportunity to prove their worth. But as they investigate, they begin to suspect that the kidnapping may be part of a much larger game—and that powerful people within the intelligence establishment have their own reasons for wanting the truth to remain hidden.
Combining tense espionage with dark humour and political satire, Slow Horses offers a refreshingly unglamorous portrait of intelligence work. Mick Herron explores ambition, professional failure, and institutional corruption, revealing how the people dismissed as useless can sometimes see what the powerful refuse to acknowledge.
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- Published
- 2010
- Author
- Mick Herron