The Slough House Novels
“Herron writes squeakingly well-plotted spy thrillers . . . He’s a world-bringer, the creator of a still-growing fictional universe with its own gravity, lingo, and surface tension.”
—The Atlantic
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Book 1: Slow Horses
London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,” as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.
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Book 2: Dead lions
The disgruntled agents of Slough House are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, far from his usual haunts. But the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. A s the agents dig into their fallen comrade’s circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets.
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Book 3: Real tigers
When one of their own is kidnapped and held for ransom, the agents of Slough House must defeat the odds, overturning all expectations of their competence, to breach the top-notch security of MI5’s intelligence headquarters, Regent’s Park, and steal valuable intel in exchange for their comrade’s safety. The kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg, however—the agents uncover a web of intrigue that involves not only a group of private mercenaries but the highest authorities in the Secret Service. After years spent at the bottom, the slow horses suddenly find themselves caught in the midst of a conspiracy that threatens the future of MI5.
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Book 4: Spook street
What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does someone take care of the senile spy for good?
These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sliding into dementia, and questions his grandson, River, must answer now that the spy who raised him has started to forget to wear pants. But River, himself an agent at Slough House, has other things to worry about. A bomb has detonated in the middle of a busy shopping center, killing forty innocent civilians—and that may only be the beginning of an escalating security situation.
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Book 5: London rules
At MI5 headquarters Regent’s Park, First Desk Claude Whelan is learning his job the hard way. Tasked with protecting the prime minister, he’s facing attack from all directions: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote; from the showboat’s wife, a tabloid columnist, who’s crucifying Whelan in print; and especially from his own deputy, Lady Di Taverner, who’s alert for Claude’s every stumble. Meanwhile, the country’s being rocked by an apparently random string of terror attacks, and the slow horses are about to rediscover their greatest strength—that of making a bad situation much, much worse.
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Book 6: Joe country
In Slough House, the London outpost for disgraced MI5 spies, memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking over the ashes of lost love, and new recruit Lech Wicinski, whose sins make him an outcast even among the slow horses, is determined to discover who destroyed his career, even if he tears his life apart in the process.
Meanwhile, in Regent’s Park, Diana Taverner’s tenure as First Desk is running into difficulties. If she’s going to make the Service fit for purpose, she might have to make deals with a familiar old devil.
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Book 7: Slough House
At Slough House, Brexit has taken a toll. The slow horses have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House has been erased from official records, and its members are dying in unusual circumstances, at an unusual clip. No wonder Jackson Lamb’s crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets?
With a new populist movement taking hold of London’s streets and the old order ensuring that everything’s for sale to the highest bidder, the world’s a dangerous place for those deemed surplus. Jackson Lamb and the slow horses are in a fight for their lives as they navigate dizzying layers of lies, power, and death.
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Book 8: Bad Actors
A governmental think-tank, whose remit is to curb the independence of the intelligence service, has lost one of its key members, and Claude Whelan—one-time head of MI5's Regent’s Park—is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to the Park itself, with Diana Taverner as chief suspect. Has Diana overplayed her hand at last? What’s her counterpart, Moscow’s First Desk, doing in London? And does Jackson Lamb know more than he’s telling?
Over at Slough House, with Shirley Dander in rehab, Roddy Ho in dress rehearsal, and new recruit A shley Khan turning up the heat, the slow horses are doing what they do best, and adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation . . .
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The Slough House NovelLAs
Dig deeper into Mick Herron’s critically acclaimed espionage series with these short novels set in the slow horses universe.
Standing by the wall
Espionage. Blackmail. Revenge. Cunning. Slapstick. State secrets dating back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, CWA Gold Dagger–winning author of Slow Horses. From the troubled recruitment of a new MI5 informant to a botched information transfer, Herron’s novellas capture the drama, humor, and high stakes of everyday life in the world of spycraft, a world rife with both legends and secrets, where thrill-seeking and loneliness are ubiquitous and deadly, and where the lines between friends, enemies, and lovers are perpetually blurred by circumstance and subterfuge.
Included in this collection are The List, The Marylebone Drop, and The Catch along with Herron's new addition: Standing by the Wall.
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the list
Dieter Hess, an aged spy, is dead, and John Bachelor, his MI5 handler, is in deep, deep trouble. Death has revealed that the deceased had been keeping a secret second bank account—and there’s only ever one reason a spy has a secret second bank account. The question of whether he was a double agent must be resolved, and its answer may undo an entire career’s worth of spy secrets.
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the marylebone drop
A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information. It’s also what happens just before you hit the ground.
Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, and when Solomon “Solly” Dortmund sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone café, he knows he’s witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly for MI5, he sets in motion a train of events that will alter lives.
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the catch
John Bachelor is the saddest kind of spy: not a joe in the field, not even a desk jockey, but a milkman—a part-time pension administrator whose main job is to check in on aging retired spies. Late in his career and having lost his wife, his house, and his savings after a series of unlucky choices, John’s been living in a dead man’s London apartment, hoping the bureaucracy isn’t going to catch up with him and leave him homeless. But keeping a secret among spies is a fool’s errand, and now John has made himself eminently blackmailable.
