The Twenty Sixth Book of 2026: Dead Lions, by Mick Herron
Started 8/21, finished 8/25
Dead Lions is the second of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, the stories of a group of misfit British Secret Service agents in contemporary London. I’m working my way through the first five books of the series in hopes I can catch up before Apple TV starts streaming the sixth season in mid-September. (You can see my review of Slow Horses, the first book, here.)
I like to describe the Slow Horses books as comedy, though they’re also quite serious. The slow horses themselves are disgraced-but-not-fired agents of MI5, the UK’s internal security service. They’ve been relegated to Slough House, a kind of purgatory office, where they are supposed to do low-level scut work in hopes they’ll get bored and quit. Every one of them, though, is certain they can find their way out and back to the work they’d intended to dedicate their lives to.
In this second book, one of the agents is killed, and something even the “real” spooks at MI5 headquarters in Regents Park can’t ignore. Or the possibility of a network of sleeper agents. Or a major terrorist incident uncovered almost by accident by a Slough House agent, who shouldn’t be out in the field in the first place.
The comedy comes from author Mick Herron’s background. Unlike other espionage authors like John Le Carré or Ian Fleming, Herron has no espionage background. He worked for years in a large law office, and his stories are in some ways closer to The Office than The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Herron portrays MI5 as a large organization subject to the same office politics as any other, where office drones work long hours on mind-numbing tasks (interrupted occasionally by high-stakes emergencies) alongside people they don’t really like, supervised by people with self-serving agendas only marginally related the work at hand.
It’s the mix of office comedy and high-stakes action that make Herron’s stories so appealing.
Dead Lions is carefully plotted, with twists and turns that make it a welcome page turner. What appear to be red herrings turn out to be critical clues, and Herron withholds just enough information to ratchet the stakes ever higher.
The real key to this book, and the others in the series, is Herron’s characters. Each one has a reason to have been relegated to Slough House, though we, and often their fellow slow horses, don’t always know what it is. The head of the group, was once (and actually still is) a brilliant field agent who has dissolved into a slovenly drunk who still knows how to hold secrets over his superiors. There’s a self-deluded computer genius who’s completely blind to his many shortcomings as a human being, and another who's the grandson of a revered, retired head of MI5 who gets into more trouble trying to do the right thing.
There’s a pair of star-crossed lovers, a recovering alcoholic who never served in the field but is better than most at putting clues together, and finally two new residents, one with anger issues and a coke habit and the other not really fighting a gambling problem. If your office is dysfunctional enough you may recognize some of your co-workers!
Each of the Slow Horses books is a stand-alone story, but they build on one another chonologically. Get busy, start at the beginning!
