Dead Lions (Slough House)

Second in a delightful spy series in the John LeCarré mold where the spies are not James Bond but plodders whose main opponents are bureaucratic supervisors who make the job more difficult than spies from the opposing “team”. The basic background and foundation is a group of “looser” British spies (for one reason or another, but usually because of offending the supervisors) sent to a suburban shed to do paper work but, by use of brain power, experience, insight solve the big problem that the James Bond types can’t. Plodders rule!

I started reading this series because I really like the series on Apple+. The continually shifting perspectives from which the story is told both help to enliven the many failed agents of Slough House, and to faintly annoy this reader by the end. But it’s all worth it because the story is supremely entertaining and gratifyingly complex, and the characters are well worth routing for.

Lots of fun await the reader. The author's imagination, the cast of characters, the almost believable plot make for a truly fun read. The second in the series seemed better than the first, but only slightly, as the first was terrific. Happily, I am on to the third!

The complete opposite of say, a Lee Child book: group of misfits separated from the machinations their mother ship, MI5; whose leader is sloppy, smelly, drinks and and smokes constantly. Jackson Lamb and his intriguing crew rove London in great story telling, character development, atmosphere, and dry humor. thriller, spy story, British romp, the whole is much greater than the parts. so glad the tv show, also excellent!, led me to the books..

What can I say? It’s as good as the first book. I always lose myself in the story, no irritating yanking me out of it. Love to lose myself in a writer’s story!I’m so glad Mick Herron has written a lot of books. Looking forward to the third in this Slough House series!!

Moves with an amazing pace. Keeps one guessing right up to the end. Characters are just that, but very believable!

The first entry of this series, Slow Horses, introduced Jackson Lamb, a burnt out, left over cold war spy who had made one enemy too many but also knows where all the bodies are buried (having put some of them underground himself) and in punishment MI5, the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, sentenced him to a dead end posting in a run down building in an obscure corner of London called Slough House to rot in peace and hopefully to drink himself to death. Killing two birds with one stone MI5 also banishes to his care any agents that screw up or in any other way proves to be an embarrassment but for whatever reasons would be awkward or embarrassing to fire where they are smothered with pointless paperwork in the hopes that they will take the hint and disappear quietly into the night. The inmates of this end of the line posting are derogatorily known as Slow Horses and scorned by those more fortunate. Few of the Horses are true dead weight, most merely happened to be in the wrong place at an inopportune time and paid for their sins with banishment. All except Lamb seem to have a burning drive to prove themselves. Taking advantage of this fact has the higher ups occasionally using them as deniable assets for off the book operations. The frequently unfortunate consequences of these rogue missions provides the back drop for the first two books of the series. On the outside Mick Herron presents a bleak vision of London but somehow the various Slow Horses charm the reader and come alive in a skilled author's hand as he creates a world the reader is reluctant to leave. Humor is never far off but Herron does not let the action descend into slapstick as bad things can still happen to good people. The prose ranges from well crafted to downright eloquent and the pacing is that of a pro with the POV switching rapidly among the various Slow Horses as Jackson herds his Lambs with well feigned disgust and seeming indifference but underneath it he is well aware of what is happening and doesn't let outsiders mess with his people unscathed. Another running theme is Jackson's Lamb's running battle with the higher ups back at head quarters personified delightfully in MI5's second in command, Diana Taverner (known as Lady Di) who is the archetypal cold blooded sociopathic ladder climber who has no trouble stepping over the bodies (real or literal) of friend or foe in her ascent. The end result is a superior read in any of the first five books. May the same be true of the sixth entry, Joe Country which is due out 06/11/19.

The return visit to “Slough House“ is worth the trip.Now that I’ve enjoyed season 1 of the TV show, based on book 1, I’ve got great images in my mind of the characters and their HQ. The author continues to bring London to life, builds on the internal machinations of the leadership of the MI5 organization and brings back a Cold War nemesis.Once again our antihero finds a thread and pulls on it. New characters get involved and old ones come to unexpected ends. His teams involvement in two different plot lines all comes together in a satisfying way. I hope the TV show is as faithful to the story as it was to the first. I’m going to continue to work my way through the entire series to see how long the author can come up with such creative ideas.

How do you like your spy novels - full of trickery, smoke and mirrors, dare devil action featuring a dashing hero and a little romance? Well Dead Lions has all this and more - it also has loads of dry British humour and features a team of spies who have been disgraced and parked in a siding called Slough House where it is hoped that the mundane work they are given by the powers that be will result in them resigning from the service. The problem is however, that if they get a whiff of a real 'project', they will abandon their daily mundane tasks to get back into the field and root out the bad guys.The plot has loads of twists and turns and false leads as it slowly winds its way to a very dramatic climax. The incompetence of the 'slow horses' (as the disgraced spies are referred to) and the political ambitions of some of the spies based at the Regent Park HQ, ensure that you do not know who or what to believe. You'll need to keep your wits about you as all is not as it initially appears.The real strength of the novel for me however is the characterisation. All the characters in the dysfunctional team of disgraced spies are brilliantly portrayed - none of them are particularly lovable or trustworthy but somehow you just find yourself hoping they will succeed in their quest ... and quietly groan when you discover that they are leading you hopelessly astray through their incompetence or (sometimes misguided) theories.I did not find this a particularly quick read but this did not disappoint me as I quite enjoyed savouring the many little nuances and humorous situations that pepper this story. In my opinion this is a better novel than 'Slow Horses' (the first in the series) and I think you would get even more enjoyment from this novel if you had first read 'Slow Horses'. However, it is still totally feasible to enjoy this book as a standalone novel.

This is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone – whether you are a fan of spy thrillers of not. The story line is good (though the revenge motivation given near the end maybe a tiny bit implausible) – but the convoluted and exciting plot is just the medium for some scintillating prose and a panoply of beautifully crafted characters.It probably helps if you have read the first book – but it is not essential. All you need to know is that Slough House – run by Jackson Lamb – is the dumping ground for all the burnt out and disgraced spies from MI5, assigned mind-numbingly boring admin tasks in the hope that they will resign and go away. Unfortunately for MI5, most of the Slough House denizens want back in active duty, and definitely won’t just fade away.To bring new readers up to speed – and remind old ones – you are taken on a tour of Slough House by a prowling cat who slinks into each room (seen or unseen), introducing the inhabitant(s) with the disinterest that only a cat can command: Roderick Ho, “two unfamiliar faces … so new they don’t have names yet”, Min Harper, Louisa Guy, River Cartwright, Catherine Standish and finally Jackson Lamb. Each gets a neat character summary, alongside a picture of their working environment. At the end of the book, a mouse does the rounds – summing up the changes. “For a moment Lamb has the uncomfortable sensation that this mouse is staring into a past he has tried to bury, or peering into a future he’d sooner forget. And then he blinks, and the mouse is nowhere, if it was ever there at all. ‘What this place needs is a cat,’ grumbles Lamb, but there’s no one there to hear him.”But first comes the death of a retired spy. Natural causes according to MI5, but Lamb is unconvinced. “If Dickie Bow had succumbed to a mattress fire, Lamb would have got through the five stages without batting an eye: denial, anger, bargaining, indifference, breakfast.”Bow is one of their own – and Lamb will not rest until Bow’s demise is fully explained, dragging all his team back into unsanctioned active duty.There are many red herrings and even more twists. At least two stories running – that may or may not be connected. Slough House inhabitants are put in danger – some survive, but not all. Cliff hangers are scattered throughout. “You couldn’t call it sleep. Call it overload: pain, stress; all of it tumbling over and over like an argument trapped in a washing machine; over and over until its rhythm rocked River out of consciousness and dropped him down a well of his own making.”There are bad guys – maybe the Russians. However, to my mind, the most reprehensible is MI5 agent James Webb, who cares only for his own advancement, and will shaft anyone who gets in his way (he is already responsible for River Cartwright’s banishment to Slough House – see last book). He has neither loyalty to colleagues nor to country, and is nowhere near as good at his job as he likes to think. “Webb was a suit. He wasn’t actually wearing a suit today – he wore fawn chinos and a dark-blue roll-neck under a black raincoat – but he wasn’t fooling anyone: he was a suit, and if you cut him open he’d bleed in pinstripes.”This book is hard to put down, and I recommend it highly to anyone who loves well-crafted fiction. Thankfully, the story does not end here, and there are at least another six Slough House books to go. Read them., as see if you don’t become as hooked as I am.

I need to start by confessing that somehow I originally missed "Dead Lions", the second Slough House thriller, and have only come back to it after reading books 1,3, 4 and 5 (in ascending order), so maybe my feelings about this book are a little biased having already read the later books*.You see, unlike most series that start well and at some point run out of steam, this series [IMO] started badly and after book 1 I was questioning whether I would read anymore; but, and remember that I originally skipped this second episode, the books get better and better. Now having gone back to "Dead Lions" it's reinforced my view, because while it's better than the first book (3 stars from me) it's not as good as the most recent books and I think that's because there's just not enough Jackson Lamb in this book: the more grotesque Herron paints Lamb the better the books are but at this stage he's still more myth than monster.Instead this book focuses more on the other failed spooks that have been put out to grass in Slough House. However like book one there are still far too many characters in the story to keep track of them all and the plot's a bit too so-so although there are a couple of really nice twists at the end, and there's actually quite a lot of action for the slow horses. But action's really not Herron's forte, that's comedy writing and this book lacks the witty sharpness that we see so much more of in the later books.I gave books 1 and 3 only three stars [in the case of book 3 that may have been a bit harsh] and books 4 and 5 five stars, but as I've already said this is better than book 1 so it's going to be four stars but that's with the caveat that I am now used to Herron's style of writing and have twigged that these aren't really thrillers they're comedies set in an office where the workers just happen to be spies.Recommended, but I fear that if I had actually read these books in order then "Dead Lions" might only have been three stars and could possibly have been my last Slough House thriller, but that would have been a mistake because they are worth persevering with and get better and better.Anyway ignoring all of that I can't wait for the promised TV series, but can Gary Oldman really be Jackson Lamb? That's going to challenge the make-up department!----*It's worth saying that you don't actually need to read these books in order, it helps because some of the players come and go and you could be left wondering what happened to X, but they do work as stand alone reads.

Mick Herron's Slough House spy novels seem to me to live on the precarious edge of parody. The whole premise of the stories - that the unsackable but unuseable employees of British Intelligence are banished to somewhere where they can't do any harm and hopefully will get bored enough to quit - is an open invitation to take the mick (apologies to the author, not intending to take his name in vain!). The thread of dry and usually dark humour that runs throughout would be well in keeping, as would the well drawn but somewhat quirky characters. But at the same time the plot is sharp, tight (apart from one spot which I thought could have used a bit more underpinning) and - given that we're in the smoke and mirrors world - even authentic: and the characters are people you can care about (even the ones you wouldn't want to meet).But in any case, it's perhaps a moot point. What really counts is that it's an engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable read. I'm definitely keeping Slough House - and anything else by Mick Herron - on my TBR list.

I read the first book in this Slough house/ slow horses series. I enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed the tight, dry humoured interpersonal conversations. The relationships between the failed spooks - who all end up in Slough house and resent it -are cleverly crafted and frequently amusing. Even after that one novel, Herron was being spoken of as a latter day Le Carre. How sad, then, that I found this second offering to be disappointing. The good elements remained good, but the overall plot was just too unbelievable to be taken seriously. From a subtle, well observed portrait of post cold war spies, the book deteriorated into a silly gangster thriller which wasn't even thrilling. I suspect Herron can, and will do better but this is not his best offering.