Dead Lions: Slough House Thriller 2
£0.99
*Discover The Secret Hours, the gripping new thriller from Mick Herron and an unmissable read for Slough House fans*
*Now a major TV series starring Gary Oldman*
‘The new king of the spy thriller’ Mail on Sunday
In the Intelligence Service purgatory that is Slough House, where spies mockingly called the slow horses are sent to finish what is left of their careers, their boss Jackson Lamb is on his way Oxford. A former spook has turned up dead on a bus.
Not an obvious target for assassination, Dickie Bow was a talented streetwalker back in the day. Good at following people, bringing home their secrets. Dickie was in Berlin with Jackson Lamb. Now Lamb’s got his phone, on it the last secret Dickie ever told, and reason to believe an old-time Moscow-style op is being run in the Intelligence Service’s back-yard.
Once a spook, always a spook, and Dickie was one of their own. To unearth Dickie’s dying secret Jackson Lamb and his crew of no-hopers is about to go live.
‘Mick Herron is an incredible writer’ Mark Billingham
‘The spycraft of le Carré refracted through the blackly comic vision of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22’ Financial Times
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Additional information
| Publisher | Baskerville, 1st edition (8 Oct. 2015) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 4836 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 370 pages |
by Anne Kerr
Sharp, witty and abstract brilliant. Loved this series.
by Theo GB
Enjoyed this as much as book 1. Herron’s way with writing is really excellent, the characters strong and bright.
As before, the TV adaptation brings in more action as well as pulling back a little on all the spy layers but broadening the plot.
Looking forward to watching S3 and then being able to compare.
by Kevin Wheatley
Brilliant concept, well written. Read the books, watch the TV series. Excellent if very flawed characters, good plotting. the main character, Jackson Lamb, has the intellect of George Smiley within the body of Falstaff. Impressive.
by Kindle Customer
Old spies (lions), current spies (who think they’re also lions but may not be) and slow horses who’ve blown their chance to be anything else but losers in MI5 who seem to be staffed full of donkeys although they believe they’re young Turks, young lions indeed but have to rescued, effectively, by the very people they’ve put out to pasture for messing up in various ways. At times it strays into Avengers territory with the not-so heroic second-raters having to rescue London, rescue England from rogue former KGB types who seek revenge on their former enemies in the West by dastardly means. The main characters are well drawn and the reader has a choice of who they identify with, if at all. A good follow-up to Slow Horses and I can’t wait to read the third book in the series.
by Karolin
An enjoyable read. A page-turner book. I Could not put it down. The first ‘Mick Heron’ book I have read.
I am on the lookout for the next book in this series.
by Mandrek Larl
I need to start by confessing that somehow I originally missed “Dead Lions”, the second Slough House thriller, and have only come back to it after reading books 1,3, 4 and 5 (in ascending order), so maybe my feelings about this book are a little biased having already read the later books*.
You see, unlike most series that start well and at some point run out of steam, this series [IMO] started badly and after book 1 I was questioning whether I would read anymore; but, and remember that I originally skipped this second episode, the books get better and better. Now having gone back to “Dead Lions” it’s reinforced my view, because while it’s better than the first book (3 stars from me) it’s not as good as the most recent books and I think that’s because there’s just not enough Jackson Lamb in this book: the more grotesque Herron paints Lamb the better the books are but at this stage he’s still more myth than monster.
Instead this book focuses more on the other failed spooks that have been put out to grass in Slough House. However like book one there are still far too many characters in the story to keep track of them all and the plot’s a bit too so-so although there are a couple of really nice twists at the end, and there’s actually quite a lot of action for the slow horses. But action’s really not Herron’s forte, that’s comedy writing and this book lacks the witty sharpness that we see so much more of in the later books.
I gave books 1 and 3 only three stars [in the case of book 3 that may have been a bit harsh] and books 4 and 5 five stars, but as I’ve already said this is better than book 1 so it’s going to be four stars but that’s with the caveat that I am now used to Herron’s style of writing and have twigged that these aren’t really thrillers they’re comedies set in an office where the workers just happen to be spies.
Recommended, but I fear that if I had actually read these books in order then “Dead Lions” might only have been three stars and could possibly have been my last Slough House thriller, but that would have been a mistake because they are worth persevering with and get better and better.
Anyway ignoring all of that I can’t wait for the promised TV series, but can Gary Oldman really be Jackson Lamb? That’s going to challenge the make-up department!
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*It’s worth saying that you don’t actually need to read these books in order, it helps because some of the players come and go and you could be left wondering what happened to X, but they do work as stand alone reads.
by Liz Wright
A very good read with twists and turns and the usual humour one finds in Mick Herron ‘sj amazing Slough House thrillers.
by Rosemary Standeven
This is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone – whether you are a fan of spy thrillers of not. The story line is good (though the revenge motivation given near the end maybe a tiny bit implausible) – but the convoluted and exciting plot is just the medium for some scintillating prose and a panoply of beautifully crafted characters.
It probably helps if you have read the first book – but it is not essential. All you need to know is that Slough House – run by Jackson Lamb – is the dumping ground for all the burnt out and disgraced spies from MI5, assigned mind-numbingly boring admin tasks in the hope that they will resign and go away. Unfortunately for MI5, most of the Slough House denizens want back in active duty, and definitely won’t just fade away.
To bring new readers up to speed – and remind old ones – you are taken on a tour of Slough House by a prowling cat who slinks into each room (seen or unseen), introducing the inhabitant(s) with the disinterest that only a cat can command: Roderick Ho, “two unfamiliar faces … so new they don’t have names yet”, Min Harper, Louisa Guy, River Cartwright, Catherine Standish and finally Jackson Lamb. Each gets a neat character summary, alongside a picture of their working environment. At the end of the book, a mouse does the rounds – summing up the changes.
“For a moment Lamb has the uncomfortable sensation that this mouse is staring into a past he has tried to bury, or peering into a future he’d sooner forget. And then he blinks, and the mouse is nowhere, if it was ever there at all. ‘What this place needs is a cat,’ grumbles Lamb, but there’s no one there to hear him.”
But first comes the death of a retired spy. Natural causes according to MI5, but Lamb is unconvinced.
“If Dickie Bow had succumbed to a mattress fire, Lamb would have got through the five stages without batting an eye: denial, anger, bargaining, indifference, breakfast.”
Bow is one of their own – and Lamb will not rest until Bow’s demise is fully explained, dragging all his team back into unsanctioned active duty.
There are many red herrings and even more twists. At least two stories running – that may or may not be connected. Slough House inhabitants are put in danger – some survive, but not all. Cliff hangers are scattered throughout.
“You couldn’t call it sleep. Call it overload: pain, stress; all of it tumbling over and over like an argument trapped in a washing machine; over and over until its rhythm rocked River out of consciousness and dropped him down a well of his own making.”
There are bad guys – maybe the Russians. However, to my mind, the most reprehensible is MI5 agent James Webb, who cares only for his own advancement, and will shaft anyone who gets in his way (he is already responsible for River Cartwright’s banishment to Slough House – see last book). He has neither loyalty to colleagues nor to country, and is nowhere near as good at his job as he likes to think.
“Webb was a suit. He wasn’t actually wearing a suit today – he wore fawn chinos and a dark-blue roll-neck under a black raincoat – but he wasn’t fooling anyone: he was a suit, and if you cut him open he’d bleed in pinstripes.”
This book is hard to put down, and I recommend it highly to anyone who loves well-crafted fiction. Thankfully, the story does not end here, and there are at least another six Slough House books to go. Read them., as see if you don’t become as hooked as I am.