Slow Horses
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4.2 • 788 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Now an Apple Original series streaming on Apple TV+ starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Welcome to the thrilling and unnervingly prescient world of the slow horses. This team of MI5 agents is united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.
This special tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of a modern classic includes a foreword by the author, discussion questions for book clubs, and an exclusive short story featuring the slow horses.
London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,” as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.
When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The title of this thriller, like so much of its story, is a misdirection—Slow Horses moves with the force of a stampede. Assigned to the lowly Slough House, disgraced British intelligence agent River Cartwright seeks redemption by trying to stop a beheading before it’s broadcast live. Mick Herron’s methodical pacing and memorable characters explain why he’s become one of the UK’s most dependable spy novelists. This novel’s a must-read for fans of suspenseful, intriguing thrillers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Banished to London’s Slough House—the junkyard for disgraced MI5 agents—for botching a high-profile training exercise, River Cartwright spends his days sifting through garbage and transcribing phone conversations in Herron’s riveting spy thriller. His boss, Jackson Lamb, who governs Slough House as if it’s his own kingdom, makes sure the “slow horses” know they’ll never get back to high-profile work at Regent’s Park. River, bored with his tedious assignments, discovers that one of his fellow agents has been lifting information from Robert Hobden, a well-known journalist. When a Muslim teenager is kidnapped and a video promising to decapitate him appears online, River wonders if it’s connected to Hobden, who has ties to the extremist British Patriotic Party. Herron (Smoke & Whispers) avoids the easy cliché of misfits banding together to right a wrong, instead painting his slow horses as complex characters who are just as fallible as their “faster” counterparts.
Customer Reviews
Characters characters setting
In that order. Mr. Herron writes great characters and then adds dimension after dimension to them. The settings are well-crafted and described where the reader can visualize and it fills the senses. I read this after watching the AppleTV series and I still found the story compelling and was rewarded with additional depth of the characters. I’ll be reading much more from the gifted Mick Herron.
le Carré Light
I enjoyed this first book in the series. The Slough House purgatory works and Mick Herron knows how to tell a story. That each short section had to end with such an obvious cliffhanger objective got a little tiresome and fitting so much into that technique seemed to limit other narrative possibilities. There are lots of characters and they’re interesting and funny if a little too morose. I’ll keep reading the series.
Excellent
It certainly is reminiscent of le Carre at his best. A wonderful very British Spy Novel