Mick Herron

London's Slough House is where the 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 here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and 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...

"At Slough House-MI5's London depository for demoted spies-Brexit has taken a toll. The "slow horses" have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House wiped from Service records-and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets? With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's...

"If Spook Street is where spies live, Joe Country is where they go to die. In Slough House, the London outpost for disgraced spies MI5, memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking over the ashes of lost love, and new recruit Lech Wicinski, whose sins make him outcast even among the slow horses, is determined to discover who destroyed his career, even if he tears his life apart in the process....

"Espionage. Subterfuge. Blackmail. Mystery. Humor. Revenge. Failure. Success. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, author of the Slough House novels, the books that inspired Slow Horses from Apple TV+. For fans new and old, Standing by the Wall is both an excellent introduction to the extended literary universe of Mick Herron and an immersive expansion of said universe. Meet more bad spies and even worse detectives....

"In London's MI5 headquarters a scandal is brewing that could disgrace the entire intelligence community. The Downing Street superforecaster-a specialist who advises the Prime Minister's office on how policy is likely to be received by the electorate-has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, who was once head of MI5, has been tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads him straight back to Regent's Park itself, with First Desk Diana Taverner...

"Dieter Hess, an aged spy, is dead, and John Bachelor, his MI5 handler, is in deep, deep trouble. Death has revealed that the deceased had been keeping a secret second bank account--and there's only ever one reason a spy has a secret second bank account. The question of whether he was a double agent must be resolved, and its answer may undo an entire career's worth of spy secrets"--

"Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, and when Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he's witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly for MI5, he sets in motion a train of events that will alter lives"--