The Twenty Third Book of 2026: Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

Started 7/21/26, Finished 7/24/26

If I really enjoy a book, I’m likely to want to read it again, and Mick Herron’s espionage story Slow Horses has surfaced from the murky depths of my To Be Read pile for a fresh look, five years later. Part of my goal of reading a bunch of books at once seems to depend on a balance of familiarity and novelty, as well as (relative) brevity. I can often get through a Herron book in four or five days, as opposed to books that are compelling but seem endless.

And his books are hard to put down, especially after you reach the halfway point.

The Slow Horses of the book’s title are agents of MI5, Britain’s internal intelligence agency, who have fouled up so badly they’ve been put out to pasture, assigned scut-work in hopes they’ll get sick of it and quit so the agency can avoid the legal morass of firing a secret agent.

Though author Mick Herron was inspired by the spy stories of John Le Carré, Slow Horses is not that kind of spy novel. Nor is it James Bond. Instead, it’s a comedy. What richer field for amusement is there than a group of foul-ups who dislike and distrust each other, hate their boss, and have been rejected from the work they aimed to dedicate their lives to? The choices are either dismal dramas or darkly amusing workplace comedies, which Slow Horses is – with added murder and mayhem.

The man in charge of the motley crew is Jackson Lamb, a slovenly, burned-out former field agent whose best years were spent doing spy-stuff in Cold War Berlin. Playing opposite him is the ruthless and ambitious Diana “Lady Di” Taverner, Second Desk at MI5’s headquarters. The story is, on one level, about who’s really in charge of the book’s particular situation, the old dog who knows where the bodies are buried (and buried some of them himself) or the savvy and powerful political player. On another level, it’s about how the misfits go off reservation to handle the problem.

At stake is the life of a young man, apparently kidnapped and targeted for execution by a right-wing group, and a growing number of dead and injured bodies among the Slow Horses themselves. The book sets the tone for what so far has become a series of nine books, surrounded by a set of short stories and novellas and a very successful Apple TV series with the chameleon-like Gary Oldham as Jackson Lamb and Kristen Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner.

One of Herron’s strengths as a writer is his characterization. Not only does Slow Horses have a great story, the plot is driven by the Herron’s strong characters. Even Slough House, the run-down, nondescript building near the City of London’s Barbican Centre where the Slow Horses work, is a living, breathing character, as critical to the story as Lamb, Taverner, or the Slow Horses themselves.

Now that I’ve started, I won’t be able to avoid re-reading the whole series. They’ll make nice breaks from the longer stuff.