Slow Horses

Mick Herron

Pick it up: If you're in the mood for a fast-paced and sharply written espionage thiller. If you're looking for a series to dig into in this genre, then this one should keep you happily occupied for a while.

Slow Horses is the first novel in the Slough House spy series by Mick Herron. The “slow horses” are a group of MI5 agents who have been exiled to Slough House, a rundown administrative purgatory for having made career-ending mistakes. These agents are now relegated to dull, tedious tasks of little consequence and are generally considered outcasts within the intelligence service.

The plot kicks off when a young man is abducted by a far-right group who threaten to behead him live on the internet. The whole country is watching this horror as it unfolds, hoping that surely, the unthinkable cannot happen, not on British soil. The slow horses find themselves unexpectedly caught up in the race to save the hostage and in the process uncover a deeper conspiracy.

The key characters are:

Jackson Lamb: The brilliant but cynical leader whose looks can deceive. A veteran spy with a mysterious past, he seems content to be in charge of Slough House. He torments his subordinates, generally having nothing good to say about any of them.
River Cartwright: A young and ambitious agent with a family connection to the service, he is desperate to redeem himself and return to the main MI5.
Catherine Standish: An alcoholic agent haunted by her past mistakes, relegated to doing mind-numbing paperwork for the present, but has more experience than the rest and knows almost as much as Lamb about how the service operates.
Louisa Guy, Min Harper and Roderick Ho: Louisa and Min are field agents. Louisa’s costly mistake was losing a target on surveillance and Harper’s was a dumb mistake of leaving a classified disk on the Tube. Ho is the geek, the guy who can hack his way into anything, but while he taps into the backstories and secrets of his colleagues, he has no idea why he has been banished to Slough House (he had no public error or fiasco to answer for)

A riverting and fast-paced thriller that you will want to read more of.