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Summary
Summary
Ian Fleming. John le Carré. Len Deighton. Mick Herron. The brilliant plotting of Herron's twice CWA Dagger Award-winning Slough House series of spy novels is matched only by his storytelling gift and an ear for viciously funny political satire.
"Mick Herron is the John le Carré of our generation." --Val McDermid
At MI5 headquarters Regent's Park, First Desk Claude Whelan is learning the ropes the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number Ten; from the showboat's wife, a tabloid columnist, who's crucifying Whelan in print; from the PM's favorite Muslim, who's about to be elected mayor of the West Midlands, despite the dark secret he's hiding; 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.
Over at Slough House, the MI5 satellite office for outcast and demoted spies, the agents are struggling with personal problems: repressed grief, various addictions, retail paralysis, and the nagging suspicion that their newest colleague is a psychopath. Plus someone is trying to kill Roddy Ho. But collectively, they're about to rediscover their greatest strength--that of making a bad situation much, much worse.
It's a good thing Jackson Lamb knows the rules. Because those things aren't going to break themselves.
Author Notes
Mick Herron is a British author, born in Newcastle upon Tyne. He writes mystery and thriller novels and short stories. He is the author of Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, and Spook Street, in the Jackson Lamb series. His other works include Down Cemetery Road, Smoke & Whispers, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, The List: A Novella, and Spook Street. He won the 2013 CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger for his novel, Dead Lions.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British author Herron's superlative fifth Slough House novel (after 2017's Spook Street) opens with a terrorist attack in Derbyshire that kills 12. All MI5 resources are looking for the culprits-with the notable exception of the "slow horses," the spies demoted to London's Slough House, who suffer from self-doubt and the crushing weight of the abuse of their leader, Jackson Lamb, "a fat bastard you dismissed at your peril." They are actually pretty competent, and one of them, J.K. Coe, has a powerful insight into the Derbyshire terrorists after a second attack. Meanwhile, someone's trying to kill hacker Roddy Ho, and Ho's colleagues want to know who and why. Eventually, the investigation into Ho's attempted murder converges with the search for the terrorists. The ironic title, an echo of the "Moscow rules" trope of cold war fiction, conjures up the absurdities and intrigues of bureaucracy, espionage, and politics. Herron combines a strong plot with a fine, often comic style as he celebrates the power of community in response to terrorsim. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.) (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Britain reels when 14 residents of the tiny village of Abbotsfield are killed. But it's the discredited spies of Slough House, cast out of MI5 in Regent's Park, who suss out what's behind the killings. Abbotsfield is just the first of what seem random attacks: a bomb explodes in a penguin enclosure in a park, another bomb is found on a train. When ballistics link Abbotsfield to recent attempts on the life of Slough House techie Roderick Ho, his colleagues take action, ignoring a directive to stay in lockdown. Meanwhile, over at MI5, the bureaucrats must appease the prime minister and keep an eye on two populist politicians. All of which the outrageous, malaprop-dropping Jackson Lamb, who heads Slough House and knows the London Rules governing official espionage protocol, understands all too well. Herron's sharp wit makes the Slough House novels something special, his team of maverick spies bringing a delightful, freewheeling edge to the genre. This is prime spy fiction with more than a touch of wry.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2018 Booklist
Guardian Review
Herron cleverly subverts Le Carré in the latest instalment of the Jackson Lamb spy series, a farce around terrorist atrocities This is the fifth in Mick Herron s Jackson Lamb series, which in characterisation and tone is essentially a rollicking subversion of John le Carré s books about George Smiley. Whereas Smiley is the humane genius of the British secret service, his worst vice being reading German poetry in the original, Herrons main spy is Lamb, a bigoted, philistine, morbidly obese, spectacularly flatulent, alcoholic chain-smoker whose newest grossness, introduced in this instalment, is spitting back into the offices communal Haribo packet the flavours he finds unappetising. Lamb is himself found distasteful by MI5 high command; after a previously vague disgrace, which is finally detailed in this book, he was sent as punishment to run Slough House, an MI5 naughty step for those who have suffered personal or professional reverses of fortune. These assorted career-stalled operatives include Shirley Dander, who starts the new book 62 days clean of cocaine, and Catherine Standish, who is struggling to stay off the bottle. River Cartwright joined MI5 because all the men in his family did, but screwed up so badly that he neutralised the nepotism, and Roderick Ho is an IT geek whose precise character defect has so far been sketchy in the series, but becomes the crux of London Rules. I laughed out loud at the ingeniously ridiculous way in which one villain is finished off While Smileys crises arose from Soviet-run eastern Europe, Lambs emanate from post-Soviet Russia and the Middle East, especially the jihadists of Islamic State, although the eventual solution of London Rules cleverly involves a fresher modern enemy of the west, previously relatively neglected in fiction. The new book is also set specifically after the EU referendum. Its antagonist, Dennis Gimball, is the UKs leading Eurosceptic MP, with a wife who writes a tabloid column. As in earlier books, which featured a floppy-fringed bicycling Westminster populist, Herron adeptly negotiates the rules of satire and the laws of libel to create fictional public figures who simultaneously hit more than one real-life bullseye. During a series of terrorist attacks on Britain, Slough House detects a threat to Gimball, making the reader wonder whether the espionage rejects are capable of saving the politician and, frankly, whether we want them to. Stylistically, Herrons narrative voice swoops from the high times of day are given personified sections describing the movement through London of Dawn, Noon, Dusk, Night to the low, such as a gag about Lambs flatulence being paradoxically bottomless. But its the dialogue that zings: the screenwriters of the inevitable TV version wont have to change much. Lamb compares ethical behaviour to a vajazzle on a nun. Pretty to picture, but who really benefits? Herrons ear falters only in the oddity that characters of all ages and backgrounds relentlessly say going to as gunna, which grates on the page. The dominant tactic, though, is the juxtaposition of big jokes and high jeopardy. Many tragicomedies alternate strands of each strain, but Herron more boldly attempts to wear the contrasting Greek masks at the same time, constructing, in London Rules, a farce around terrorist atrocities and assassinations. Although this approach would prove intolerable for anyone directly affected by terrorism, its success can be judged by the fact that I laughed out loud at the ingeniously ridiculous way in which one villain is finished off. This scene, in also seeming to contain a deliberate echo of Graham Greenes story A Shocking Accident, is part of Herrons web of affectionate references to predecessors in the espionage genre. Herron negotiates the laws of libel to create fictional public figures who hit more than one real-life bullseye Herron is a very funny writer, but also a serious plotter: London Rules smartly turns on the realisation by foreign enemies of how a piece of colonial knowhow, discovered by Britain during its imperial pomp, can be turned against the 21st-century nation. Readers may sometimes feel queasy that the creation of Lamb, a man who says the unsayable, gives Herron easy licence to write the unwritable on subjects such as race and disability, in the way that character comedy can allow performers to pass off bigotry as irony. For me, though, these grotesque creations have the subtler purpose of challenging a society that increasingly applies sensitivity and offensiveness tests to public discourse. Where Herrons novels most overlap with those of Le Carré is in the severity of their critique of the failures of management in post-imperial, preBrexit Britain. The most savage gag in the Slough House books, made ever more explicit in London Rules, is that while Lambs gang may be variously incompetent and psychopathic, they are the last best hope of the nation in comparison with the outwardly more reliable types at the top of politics and the security services. Will those who are best at watching their mouths always be best at watching our backs? - Mark Lawson..
Kirkus Review
A sixth round of troubles for the slow horses of Slough House, where burned-out, compromised, or incompetent members of Her Majesty's intelligence community have been banished (Spook Street, 2017, etc.), pits them against a group of terrorists who seem to be working from MI5's own playbook.It doesn't usually make headlines when a crew of uniformed men efficiently murder a dozen inhabitants of an isolated village, but when the target is Abbotsfield, in the shadow of the Derbyshire hills, attention must be paid. The time-servers at Slough House, the last group anyone in the know would expect to get anywhere near this outrage, are roped into it when Shirley Dander celebrates her 62nd drug-free day by saving her colleague Roderick Ho from getting run down by a car. Flatulent Jackson Lamb, the head of the troops at Slough House, doesn't believe Shirley's story of attempted vehicular homicide, but even he changes his tune after a second attempt on Ho's life kills an intruder whose corpse promptly disappears and police match the bullets found at the scene to one of the weapons used in the Abbotsfield massacre. When someone tosses a bomb into the penguin shelter in Dobsey Park and a second bomb is disabled before it can blow up a Paddington-bound train, alarm bells go off for J.K. Coe, the newest arrival to Slough House, who realizes (1) these outrages are all being perpetrated by the same team, (2) they're following a blueprint originally conceived by the intelligence community, and (3) they still have several escalating chapters left to go. Just in case this all sounds uncomfortably menacing, a subplot concerning the threats posed to the nation's security by a cross-dressing Brexit partisan is uncomfortably comical.Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom's intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny as Bill James' cops and robbers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The grisly traces of the previous incident at Slough House (the satellite office for demoted and outcast British spies) have been painted over, but Jackson Lamb and his deplorables still work in shadows so deep that in a fresh red alert, the team is locked down on site. A raging crescendo dominates MI5 as the elite top desks deal with Brexit politics, evasions of a Muslim mayoral candidate, terrorist attacks, and the internal fight-to-the-career-death battle to be First Desk. Rude and crude Lamb slyly mentors his team of joes to keep them from getting erased from the payroll. Lauded as a brilliant satirist needling British spydom in a verso version of John le Carré, Herron writes with literary panache that belies the rough aggression of current international relations. VERDICT Fans of the CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning series will dive into the scrum of Herron's fifth outing (after Spook House) and thus deeply enjoy the mordant humor woven into the insanely complicated plot.-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The killers arrived in a sand-coloured jeep, and made short work of the village. There were five of them and they wore mismatched military gear, two opting for black and the others for piebald variations. Neckerchiefs covered the lower half of their faces, sunglasses the upper, and their feet were encased in heavy boots, as if they'd crossed the surrounding hills the hard way. From their belts hung sundry items of battleground kit. As the first emerged from the vehicle he tossed a water bottle onto the seat behind him, an action replicated in miniature in his aviator lenses. It was approaching noon, and the sun was as white as the locals had known it. Somewhere nearby, water tumbled over stones. The last time trouble had called here, it had come bearing swords. Out of the car, by the side of the road, the men stretched and spat. They didn't talk. They seemed in no hurry, but at the same time were focused on what they were doing. This was part of the operation: arrive, limber up, regain flexibility. They had driven a long way in the heat. No sense starting before they were in tune with their limbs and could trust their reflexes. It didn't matter that they were attracting attention, because nobody watching could alter what was to happen. Forewarned would not mean forearmed. All the villagers had were sticks. One of these--an ancient thing bearing many of the characteristics of its parent tree, being knobbled and imprecise, sturdy and reliable--was leaned on by an elderly man whose weathered looks declared him farming stock. But somewhere in his history, perhaps, lurked a memory of war, for of all those watching the visitors perform their callisthenics he alone seemed to understand their intent, and into his eyes, already a little tearful from the sunshine, came both fear and a kind of resignation, as if he had always known that this, or something like it, would rear up and swallow him. Not far away, two women broke off from conversation. One held a cloth bag. The other's hands moved slowly towards her mouth. A barefoot boy wandered through a doorway into sunlight, his features crumpling in the glare. In the near distance a chain rattled as a dog tested its limits. Inside a makeshift coop, its mesh and wooden struts a patchwork of recycled materials, a chicken squatted to lay an egg no one would ever collect. From the back of their jeep the men fetched weapons, sleek and black and awful. The last ordinary noise was the one the old man made when he dropped his stick. As he did so his lips moved, but no sound emerged. And then it began. From afar, it might have been fireworks. In the surrounding hills birds took to the air in a frightened rattle, while in the village itself cats and dogs leaped for cover. Some bullets went wild, sprayed in indiscriminate loops and skirls, as if in imitation of a local dance; the chicken coop was blasted to splinters, and scars were chipped into stones that had stood unblemished for centuries. But others found their mark. The old man followed his stick to the ground, and the two women were hurled in opposite directions, thrown apart by nodules of lead that weighed less than their fingers. The barefoot boy tried to run. In the hillsides were tunnels carved into rock, and given time he might have found his way there, waited in the darkness until the killers had gone, but this possibility was blasted out of existence by a bullet that caught him in the neck, sending him cartwheeling down the short slope to the river, which was little more than a trickle today. The villagers caught in the open were scattering now, running into the fields, seeking shelter behind walls and in ditches; even those who hadn't seen what was happening had caught the fear, for catastrophe is its own herald, trumpeting its arrival to early birds and stragglers alike. It has a certain smell, a certain pitch. It sends mothers shrieking for their young, the old looking for God. And two minutes later it was over, and the killers left. The jeep, which had idled throughout the brief carnage, spat stones as it accelerated away, and for a short while there was stillness. The sound of the departing engine folded into the landscape and was lost. A buzzard mewed overhead. Closer to home a gurgle sounded in a ruined throat, as someone struggled with a new language, whose first words were their last. And behind that, and then above it, and soon all around it, grew the screams of the survivors, for whom all familiar life was over, just as it was for the dead. Within hours trucks would come bearing more men with guns, this time trained outwards, on the surrounding hillsides. Helicopters would land, disgorging doctors and military personnel, and others would fly overhead, crisscrossing the sky in orchestrated rage, while TV cameras pointed and blamed. On the streets shrouds would cover the fallen, and newly loosed chickens would wander by the river, pecking in the dirt. A bell would ring, or at least, people would remember it ringing. It might have been in their minds. But what was certain was that there would still be, above the buzzing helicopters, a sky whose blue remained somehow unbroken, and a distant buzzard mewing, and long shadows cast by the stunned Derbyshire hills. PART ONE COOL CATS In some parts of the world dawn arrives with rosy fingers, to smoothe away the creases left by night. But on Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, it comes wearing safecracker's gloves, so as not to leave prints on windowsills and doorknobs; it squints through keyholes, sizes up locks and generally cases the joint ahead of approaching day. Dawn specialises in unswept corners and undusted surfaces, in the nooks and chambers day rarely sees, because day is all business appointments and things being in the right place, while its younger sister's role is to creep about in the breaking gloom, never sure of what it might find there. It's one thing casting light on a subject. It's another expecting it to shine. So when dawn reaches Slough House--a scruffy building whose ground floor is divided between an ailing Chinese restaurant and a desperate newsagent's, and whose front door, made filthy by time and weather, never opens--it enters by the burglar's route, via the rooftops opposite, and its first port of call is Jackson Lamb's office, this being on the uppermost storey. Here it finds its only working rival a standard lamp atop a pile of telephone directories, which have so long served this purpose they have moulded together, their damp covers bonding in involuntary alliance. The room is cramped and furtive, like a kennel, and its overpowering theme is neglect. Psychopaths are said to decorate their walls with crazy writing, the loops and whorls of their infinite equations an attempt at cracking the code their life is hostage to. Lamb prefers his walls to do their own talking, and they have cooperated to the extent that the cracks in their plasterwork, their mildew stains, have here and there conspired to produce something that might amount to an actual script--a scrawled observation, perhaps--but all too quickly any sense these marks contain blurs and fades, as if they were something a moving finger had writ before deciding, contrary to the wisdom of ages, to rub out again. Lamb's is not a room to linger in, and dawn, anyway, never tarries long. In the office opposite, it finds less to disturb it. Here order has prevailed, and there is a quiet efficiency about the way in which folders have been stacked, their edges squared off in alignment with the desktop, and the ribbons binding them tied in bows of equal length; about the emptiness of the wastepaper basket, and the dust-free surfaces of the well-mannered shelves. There is a stillness here out of keeping with Slough House, and if one were to seesaw between these two rooms, the bossman's lair and Catherine Standish's bolt-hole, a balance might be found that could bring peace to the premises, though one would imagine it would be short-lived. As is dawn's presence in Catherine's room, for time is hurrying on. On the next level down is a kitchen. Dawn's favourite meal is breakfast, which is sometimes mostly gin, but either way it would find little to sustain it here, the cupboards falling very much on Scrooge's end of the Dickensian curve, far removed from Pickwickian excess. The cupboards contain no tins of biscuits, no jars of preserves, no emergency chocolate and no bowls of fruit or packets of crispbread mar the counter's surface; just odds and ends of plastic cutlery, a few chipped mugs and a surprisingly new-looking kettle. True, there is a fridge, but all it holds are two cans of energy drink, both stickered "Roddy Ho," each of which rubric has had the words "is a twat" added, in different hands, and an uncontested tub of hummus, which is either mint-flavoured or has some other reason for being green. About the appliance hangs an odour best described as delayed decay. Luckily, dawn has no sense of smell. Having briefly swept through the two offices on this floor--nondescript rooms whose colour schemes can only be found in ancient swatches, their pages so faded, everything has subsided into shades of yellow and grey--and taken care to skirt the dark patch beneath the radiator, where some manner of rusty leakage has occurred, it finds itself back on the staircase, which is old and rackety, dawn the only thing capable of using it without making a sound--apart, that is, from Jackson Lamb, who when he feels like it can wander Slough House as silently as a newly conjured wraith, if rather more corpulent. At other times Lamb prefers the direct approach, and attacks the stairs with the noise that a bear pushing a wheelbarrow might make, if the wheelbarrow was full of tin cans, and the bear drunk. More watchful ghost than drunken bear, dawn arrives in the final two offices and finds little to distinguish them from those on the floor above, apart, perhaps, from the slightly stuccoed texture of the paintwork behind one desk, as if a fresh coat has been applied before the wall has been properly cleaned, and some lumpy matter has been left clinging to the plasterwork: best not to dwell on what this might be. For the rest, this office has the same air of frustrated ambition as its companions, and to one as sensitive as light-fingered dawn it contains, too, a memory of violence, and perhaps the promise of more to come. But dawn understands that promises are easily broken--dawn knows all about breaking--and the possibility delays it not one jot. On it goes, down the final set of stairs, and somehow passes through the back door without recourse to the shove this usually requires, the door being famously resistant to casual use. In the dank little yard behind Slough House dawn pauses, aware that its time is nearly up, and enjoys these last cool moments. Once upon a time it might have heard a horse making its way up the street; more recently, the happy hum of a milk float would have whiled away its final minute. But today there is only the scream of an ambulance, late for an appointment, and by the time its banshee howl has ceased bouncing off walls and buildings dawn has disappeared, and here in its place is the day itself, which, once within Slough House's grasp, turns out to be far from the embodiment of industry and occupation it threatened to be. Instead--like the day before it, and the one before that--it is just another slothful interlude to be clock watched out of existence, and knowing full well that none of the inhabitants can do anything to hasten its departure, it takes its own sweet time about setting up shop. Casually, smugly, unbothered by doubt or duty, it divides itself between Slough House's offices, and then, like a lazy cat, settles in the warmest corners to doze, while nothing much happens around it. Excerpted from London Rules by Mick Herron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.