Slow Horses is the first novel in the Slough House series by British author, Mick Herron. Slough House is a repository for inconvenient or incompetent spooks: the spies who have caused embarrassment by leaving a sensitive disc in a tube station or had an affair with the Venezuelan ambassador’s wife, or closed down Kings Cross Station in a training exercise. The “Slow Horses” are banished from Regent’s Park to Slough House where the hope is to bore the dead weights into jumping ship, to get them to quit the Service, ground into submission by routine tasks.

The current staff of nine are assigned riveting assignments like combing Twitter feeds, monitoring overseas student attendances, scanning through mobile phone conversations and comparing real estate purchases with immigration records, by their boss, Jackson Lamb. Does this make for a harmonious workplace? Indeed it does not! They may all be equally frustrated at their exclusion from real ops, but they barely tolerate each other, and their dislike for their boss is thinly (if at all) veiled.

When the newsfeeds show a youth of Pakistani extraction being threatened with beheading by an obscure right-wing extremist group, slow horse River Cartwright immediately makes a connection to the right-wing former journalist whose garbage bag he was assigned to examine as a harmless errand for the Park. Hungry for action, River decides he has to do something, but his covert surveillance does not end well. Before long, the Slough House crew find themselves in a race against time to save the boy (with their talents? Unlikely!) and to avoid being scapegoats for an op gone horribly wrong (virtually impossible!).

Herron gives the reader a fast-paced spy novel of a very different sort. The premise is original, and the execution is inspired. The characters are all credibly flawed, their dialogue is full of dry wit, and there is plenty of humour, most of it very black and very British, with an abundance of laugh out loud moments. There are twists and red herrings and the reader will find it hard not to cheer these misfits on as they do their best. Readers will be pleased to learn there are three and a half further volumes of this series for their entertainment and enjoyment. A brilliant read!