"Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

Significantly better than most of the offerings in this genre. this is 

an enjoyable and entertaining spy thriller, containing plenty of comedy and moments of genuine tension.

A student has been kidnapped and his captors are threatening to behead him live on the internet. Can the 'slow horses' of Slough House, where the failures from MI5 are sent so, bored with mundane paperwork, they will resign, save the young man. 

It is written in the past tense using multiple 3rd person limited points of view.

Selected quotes:

• Hobden “still read [journalistic] copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent's Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts.” (Ch 2)
• “Half of the future is buried in the past.” (Ch 2)
• “Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one.” (Ch 2)
• “He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn't make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.” (Ch 4)
• “She waved her hand airily; her standard semaphore for trivial detail.” (Ch 5)
• “You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite.” (Ch 8)
• “If we're paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?” (Ch 8)
• “The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days.” (Ch 8)
• “The wheels started coming off before you screwed them on.” (Ch 11)
• “This couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it at IKEA.” (Ch 11)
• “Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.” (Ch 13)
• “Web was under thirty, and married to the notion that anyone twenty years older was lucky to have made it through the flood.” (Ch 15)

Notes:

• The dodgy politician Peter Judd ("PJ") is a caricature based on ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (BJ).
• At one point, Slough House is compared to Pincher Martin's Island. Pincher Martin is a novel about a shipwrecked sailor written by William Golding.

March 2026; 328 pages

First published in 2015 by John Murray

My paperback edition was issued in 2017

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God