River Cartwright blew up his career on a mission gone bad. Now he labors with other failed intelligence workers in "Slough House," shuffling paper, picking through garbage and doing soul-sucking work designed to drive them out of the job--or at least keep them out of way.
This is an anti-John le Carré novel: instead of brilliant intelligence analysts sorting out a case, it's screwups and political outcasts. Except that Slough House is led by Jackson Lamb, a man who might be far more competent than he behaves.
Author Mick Herron has an unusual gift for misdirecting the reader, in fact this might be his most notable technical skill. The reader spends a good portion of the book either in the dark or deliberately set up with incorrect beliefs about what's happening.
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The book opens with a mournful, depressed vibe: these are not Her Majesty's finest, they all know it, and the reader learns it too from the characters' inner thoughts, their backstories, their interactions. The story becomes increasingly intricate and really gets going about 160 pages in, as this team of career misfits begins to gel, begins to believe in themselves, and sorts out a complex case that reaches up into the highest levels of the intelligence service.
Slow Horses has moments of implausibility, but also moments of genuine tension and drama. Readable and diverting.
[Readers, the notes below are just to help me remember plot points and notable elements of the book. They can be safely skipped.]
Notes:
Part One: Slough House
* River Cartwright screws up a mission that results in a terrorist detonating a suicide bomb in front of a tube train.
* Slough House and Jackson Lamb: this is the worst assignment you can be sent to if you're in intelligence. River's job now is picking through garbage seized from a journalist's bin.
* Journalist Robert Hobden at a restaurant: a pretty young redhead talks to him, and then contrives to spill cappuccino everywhere.
* We meet a few of the other characters of Slough House: Roderick Ho, describing the others at Slough House, none of whom he likes. Catherine Standish: "Her hair was still blonde, but only when you got close, and nobody got close."
* The vibe in this office among this sad, pathetic group of sad-sack intelligence service rejects is unbelievably depressing. The author develops and describes it perfectly.
* River Cartwright is summoned to Jackson Lambs office by Lamb pounding on the floor with a stick. We learn River's backstory: he's protected from getting fired because of his grandfather's storied career in intelligence, but he'll be in the Slough House for a very long time after his failed mission. And then in walks the red-haired woman, Sid Baker, who spilled Robert Hobden's coffee at the restaurant. She had stolen and copied his memory stick.
* River is sent to HQ to deliver the memory stick; strangely the reader learns he injured his hand somehow; he delivers the thumb drive to his old partner James "Spider" Webb--who River believes fucked up the mission that blew up his career, not him, although River took the fall for it. "You ever going to admit you made a mistake?" We learn that River injured his hand opening the flash box to get at the thumb drive himself.
* Catherine Standish: we learn her backstory now: old, once lovely, alone; she walked in to her boss's apartment to find him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, she was having an affair with him--of a sort. His suicide basically destroyed her career in intelligence. She's a recovering alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in ten years.
* Min Harper, divorced, two sons, nine and eleven. He blew up his career in one stupid moment: he left a classified disc on the tube; he was even satirized on TV, he became a total laughingstock.
* Louisa Guy and her backstory: also alone, surveilling websites for the war on terror, her work is pointless; she grinds her teeth. She's in Slough House because she screwed up a tailing operation where a black youth evaded her.
* We learn that Regent's Park and knows about Sid Baker's operation with the journalist and the thumb drive, which means that Regent's Park is actually surveilling Slough House, its own reject pool.
* Roderick Ho: enjoys cyber-stalking people, a hacker, but he can't seem to figure out the real mystery: why he got stuck in Slough House too.
* Lamb sees a teenager in the shadows on his way home, thinking he's being tailed he beats the kid up a bit with a rolled up newspaper. Then to another scene of another teenager abducted and tied up in a room. The reader is told "his name didn't matter."
* River visits his grandfather, the "Old Bastard": because of his storied career in intelligence River managed to keep his job. He asked his grandfather about Robert Hobden, the journalist that they've been surveilling. The reader gets a flashback scene here on how River was essentially abandoned by his mother to his grandparents as she ran off with another man; the author subtly reveals River's grandparents hadn't even met him until that day, even though he was already 7 years old. River returns to work the next day to find his colleagues all staring at a hostage video. The hostage, a young Pakistani boy, is going to be decapitated.
* Robert Hobden, again at his usual diner, also sees video of the young man on the BBC. He immediately picks up all his things and leaves.
* We meet Diana Taverner for the first time, and learn about her hopes to become promoted to head of MI5.
* River is in a pub downloading and looking at the information on Hobden's memory stick; he's surprised as Sid Baker sits right down with him. They have a discussion on Hobden and his "Paki-bashing," his racism, etc. But all the files on his thumbdrive contain pi to a million places. "So either Hobden was the kind of total paranoid who flaunted dummy back-ups of his real secrets, or Sid herself had pulled a fast one. Or something else was going on, and River was in the dark."
* Diana Taverner is sitting on a specific park bench along the Thames where there's no CCTV coverage. She's off the leash. She lights a cigarette. Then we flash back to a meeting early that day where information is shared among the senior people and intelligence about the young man who the captors abducted: he's in his second year at Leeds University, son a father who immigrated in the seventies, "only nominally Muslim." The group that captured him call themselves The Voice of Albion.
* Back to Taverner sitting on the bench, again thinking back on the meetings that morning. Jed Moody joins her, he must be her "asset" at Slough House. As they talk she studies him and realizes his career is finished: he's drinking and smoking too much. We also learned that Lamb knows "where all the bodies are buried." She gives Moody a phone for incoming calls only, and warns him that Lamb had been caught, tortured and shot, but survived. "She left him sitting there, and asset bought and paid for. Some were cheaper than others."
* River and Sid Baker talk out what Hobden's role might be in this alleged far-right capture operation. And then the author wrongfoots the reader, as we are briefly led to believe that the boy, Hassan, was freed, but it's just him imagining it.
* Now we meet the abductors, we don't know their names but Hassan nicknames them Larry, Curly and Moe. Curly is supposed to be the dumb one, but he makes a phone call from the bathroom, possibly to betray his co-conspirators.
* Backstory here on Catherine Standish and how she knew Lamb by reputation but was shocked at what a fat, hungover, somnolent drunk he had become. Lamb specifically asked for her to be sent to Slough House, and she never knew why.
* River is surveilling Hobden's apartment and unexpectedly Sid knocks on his window of his car with two cups of coffee. He tells her that he lifted the files from her thumb drive, and then they talk about the unlikelhood that Hobden is involved in the kidnapping in any way. Interesting comments here on provoking a reaction from the person you're tailing: "It distorts the data to provoke the target into a course of action he might not otherwise adopt."
* Sid tells him that she was sent to Slough House not because she messed up, but to keep an eye on River. Suddenly they see a dark figure approach Hobden's building, River tries to follow and then bursts into the apartment to find a man in a facemask holding Hobden at gunpoint; the gun goes off and somebody is bleeding heavily, but it's not clear who.
Part Two: Sly Whores
* Hassan is in a state of calm now that he knows he's going to die; also the group that abducted him, The Voice of Albion, has said that his death will be in response to the bombing in the tube. Louisa Guy and Min Harper are on their third drink at the same pub Sid and River were at earlier in the day. "All over the city--all over the world--this happened; co-workers ruined their chances in the pub, and forged ahead anyway." Louisa and Min head back to the office, their hands brushed in the hallway and then they started making out; but at the same time they hear a noise. At the same time Nick Duffy and Dan Hobbs, also in Slough House hear the noise too.
* Then we learn that Sid Baker was shot in the head; Lamb arrives, River is debriefed after an agent shooting.
* Min and Louisa are attacked in Slough House by a man in a balaclava.
* Now back to River: we still don't know what happened to Sid but there was so much blood.
* Back to Louisa and Min and the man who attacked them, Min and the masked man fell down a flight of stairs and it looks like the man may have broken his neck; now they're trying to work out why in Slough House--where there was never anything worth seeing or taking--would an armed man in a balaclava hide out and suddenly attack them?
* Now to River's debriefing: he saw the man in a full combat kit with a balaclava holding Hobden; he thinks he was meant to think the captors was "one of ours" but there was something not right. River actually thinks it might be Jed Moody: the man never said a thing as if he didn't want River to recognize his voice. At the same time in a parallel scene, Louisa peels off the balaclava from the man who attacked them, and they know who it is--although the reader doesn't know yet.
* Lamb drives River to Slough House: they arrive to find that Jed Moody was who attacked Louisa and Min; he's lying there with a broken neck. Lamb makes a hilarious comment here: "If you had issues with him, I could have spoken to HR." [Good on the author for inserting this.] They examine his body and Lamb finds a brown envelope inside his jacket and mutters, "Son of a bitch!" The others assume Moody was cleaning up some sort of internal spying mission inside Slough House.
* Lamb sets up a meeting with Taverner, and this conversation is woven in with Hobden worming his way into the townhouse of P.J. Judd, a new character, somehow involved in senior government, who doesn't want to have anything to do with Hobden. [This dialog and scene seem off somehow, the author is less believable here in how he shapes them.] [Note also an offhand reference here to David Kelly, and the fact that MI5 was responsible for his death; I had to delve into this rabbit hole: he was a weapons expert who officially died by "suicide" in 2003.] Through these conversations we learned that Hobden had heard politically controversial things Diana Taverner said about getting "pipsqueak fascists out of the game."
* We learned that Taverner had sent Jed Moody to steal Hobden's laptop at Slough House and make it look like a junkie theft.
* Then a conversation between Judd and Hobden gets down "to the meat of the matter" as Hobden tells him, "I have a photograph."
* The author structures short snippets of two separate conversations here to fabricate drama; also the author is "telling" all this with expository rather than "showing"; We learn that the young man Hassan is a nephew of a top intelligence person in Pakistan. And thus we learn that the entire operation is clearly a made-up thing by MI5 to "save" the boy, while discrediting far-right groups in England, and finally this false mission is designed to produce a closer relationship with intelligence in Pakistan by "rescuing" the boy. Taverner, in order to save her own skin as this mission goes sideways, offers to give Lamb and the Slough House credit for saving the case. "Do this, and you get to be a hero. Again."
* Hobden now leverages the photo to get the word out that the entire execution play was fake; that the group responsible was infiltrated by intelligence and they're making the whole thing as a PR exercise; at the same time Taverner manages to extract a commitment from Lamb although she also calls up someone to set up an insurance policy against him.
* Peter Judd has one of his associates make a few calls; Lamb gathers up his team to go save Hassan, to their shock. But they arrive too late: they arrive to find a head sitting on the kitchen table with a body lying on the floor. Afterwards we find out that River knows who the dead man was. At this point the story gets intricate and a little complicated, as Taverner now is talking about finding a decapitated body that was one of her agents, Alan Black, who she had sent in as a backup plan for the Slough House people if they screwed up the "save."
* Later we learn that River never met Alan Black: Black had quit Slough House before Rivers' arrival; River wasn't sure why his face had looked familiar. River explains to his colleagues: "We're being set up. We were supposed to be rescuing Hassan Ahmed. We find a former agent, dead. This whole Hassan thing, it must be an op. And it's every which way screwed up." Taverner backstabbed Lamb and his team and sent them to the wrong house.
* Then we have a flashback scene about what actually happened: the noise that Hassan had heard when he thought it was his rescuers, was actually Curly swinging an ax into Moe's back, who was actually Alan Black.
* This next part here is where the reader doesn't know what's going on yet, but River has been sent to gather Kay White (another of the Slough House team), but as he arrives he sees that she is put into a car by someone else.
* Now we have an implausible scene where Diana Taverner interrogating a new character, Struan Loy, deep underneath Regent's Park. This is during a section where Regent's Park, under Taverner's instructions, is rounding up all the Slough House people; but Lamb gave instructions to River, Min and Louisa to do the same. Thus we see the Taverner faction and the Lamb faction of MI5 working against each other to gather up all the agents involved in this mission that went sideways.
* Min and Louisa arrive to gather Roderick Ho, at the same time Dan Hobbs is likewise trying to get to Ho first, but Roderick Ho had changed his address a long time ago in his personnel records, so Hobbs showed up at the wrong address. Min and Louisa show up at the right address because Lamb knew it, and thus must have known that Ho had changed the database. [Subtle!]
* Lamb arrives at Standish's apartment to collect her at the same time Duffy and Webb arrive, they all get into a car with Duffy; Lamb had contrived to give Standish his gun and she pulls it on them; Lamb tells Duffy and Webb, "You two can walk home from here." The Slough House group then meets at a pre-arranged meeting place: Blake's grave. They work out what Taverner is trying to do, everyone now realizes that she contrived to have the top Pakistani intelligence officer's nephew captured, such that when MI5 rescues Hassan she'll make a permanent friend over there.
* Lamb is giving some expository to explain what's happened so far and then River, thinking, realizes where he saw Alan Black. Lamb calls the entire group useless, then takes River with him to see what's happened at the Slough House. The other remaining "slow horses" Min, Louisa, Catherine and Roderick find themselves starting to gel into a tight team working out what clues Alan Black might have left to indicate where Hassan and his captors might be. Catherine manages to find a past identity that Black reused, and she and Ho trace the rental car the group used via satnav.
* Lamb contrives to drive Duffy's car directly to Regent's Park; Lamb is brought in to a meeting with Taverner, and as she explains how she's contrived to pin all of this onto Slough House, the reader learns indirectly that Sid Baker died too. Lamb calls out Taverner for burning her own Joe, throws a wastebasket at the glass wall and claims he has a bomb placed in Duffy's car, which is now parked under the building.
* Hassan's two captors argue about whether to go through with Hassan's execution; we learn that Catherine had called the police and told them where they are, Catherine and the group are now waiting at a coffee shop to hear what happens.
* We also learn that Lamb brought River into the building hiding in the boot of his car; River went into James "Spider" Webb's office, knocks him out and then attempts to find the "London Rules" file hidden in Webb's office that would exonerate River and restore his career, but he couldn't find it time before a security guard comes in and levels a gun at him. But in another skillful wrongfooting of the reader, we learn that River had swapped shirts and ties with the unconscious Webb, so when Taverner has "Webb" brought to the conference room, it turns out out to be River instead.
* Implausible scene here where Curly is about to swing his ax at Hassan in the woods, but he trips and falls, and then Hassan picks up the ax.
* Now River takes the stage in Taverner's office and explains what's in the file: it has pictures of Taverner meeting with Alan Black. [The scene is implausible as well.] They work out a deal to keep the whole thing between themselves. At the same time Hassan holds the ax to Curly's neck but doesn't kill him; he's rescued by the police.
* The book closes with a scene looking at the Slough House from a bus stop across the street, seeing a Chinese man, Roderick Ho, sitting at a desk with a pile of pizza boxes next to him. We learn the reason why he was expelled from Regent's Park: it's because nobody likes him. Min and Louisa are still there, they actually are listening to the radio about the hit-and-run death of Robert Hobden.
* River is looking at a barrette: it's the only thing he has that proves that Sid Baker ever lived, because all records of her were sanitized, including even her stay at the hospital.
* Finally the reader learns that Jackson Lamb finally revealed to Roderick Ho why Lamb was in Slough House: it was because he was responsible for an agent's death--actually Charles Partner's death which was an execution sanctioned by River Cartwright's grandfather. He feels a (very) tiny bit of conscience for Catherine Standish and is protecting her. He's now plotting future things for Slough House. Now that he has totally outplayed Diana Taverner, perhaps he can find more worthy enemies.
Vocab:
Tannoy: British term for a PA system (often used as a trademark name)Gurning: making a grotesque face
Grand Guignol: a dramatic entertainment of a sensational or horrific nature, originally a sequence of short pieces as performed at the Grand Guignol theater in Paris
Lamping: a night-time method of hunting or pest control using high-powered lamps (spotlights) to illuminate and stun animals such as foxes, rabbits, and hares, making them easier to shoot or catch
Gonk: gonks are novelty toys and collectables originating from the UK in the 1960s
Barbican: a fortified outpost, tower, or gateway designed to defend a castle or city entrance
To Read:
William Golding: Pincher Martin
William Somerset Maugham: Ashenden: Or the British Agent
Norman Baker: The Strange Death of David Kelly