Dead Lions: Slough House Thriller 2

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The family invite him to dinner and introduce him to their visiting friend Leo, who is actually Chernitsky.

Apple’s hit espionage drama “Slow Horses” debuts season two

He, River, Min and Louisa arrive at the property but upon entry discover it empty aside from Moe's beheaded corpse. However, one of the business men behind the deal, looking to make contacts in Russia, passes on sensitive information to the GRU who are looking to escalate matters. Louisa Guy goes to Pembrokeshire to find him; after all she had been in a relationship with Min, another slow horse and Lucas’ father. Dickie Bow, formerly a street rat in Berlin who’s been following legendary Russian agent Alexander Popov, evidently learned enough for one final text message—“cicadas”—before he died, apparently of a heart attack, on a London bus. The central conceit of the books is that MI5, like any large organisation, needs somewhere to place its most hopeless employees, and this place is Slough House, a building just around the corner from the Barbican Centre.

The plot, however clever and well-worked it may be, is only part of a crime thriller and unless it is peopled with characters who come alive for the reader it can still appear somewhat mechanical. Former field agent Richard Bough, aka Dickie Bow, recognizes and follows a man who tortured him during the Cold War, only to die on a rail replacement bus from an apparent heart attack. Standish beats Krymov in a game of chess and he reveals it was Katinsky, not Pashkin, who he met with to set up the Webb meeting. This second novel from Mick Herron featuring the ‘slow horses’ centres around their seemingly apathetic and much-maligned section leader Jackson Lamb.

Dead Lions by Mick Herron | Waterstones

London’s Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. Min covertly follows them back to a commercial address at Edgware Road but is confronted by Piotr, who puts a gun to his head.Herron provides a dour, twisty spy thriller with something for everyone: part post–Cold War miasma, part James Bond heroics, and elliptical withal.

DEAD LIONS by Mick Herron | Booklover Book Reviews DEAD LIONS by Mick Herron | Booklover Book Reviews

Jonas Worth and August Drummond, the protagonists of Beside the Syrian Sea and How to Betray Your Country, respectively, both found themselves at odds with their bureaucracies. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. Catherine Standish remains an effective operator but her alcoholism killed off her career even though she is on the wagon. Driving out of London, Zeppo and Larry reveal that they never intended to go through with killing Ahmed and entertain the idea of releasing him, becoming increasingly concerned with Curly's erratic behaviour and rhetoric.Although not part of the Slough House series, Reconstruction, Nobody Walks and The Secret Hours use some of the same characters and provide some character backstory. He deduces Katinsky is the spymaster behind the cicada program (passing himself off as a junior bureaucrat when defecting to avoid suspicion) and was the handler of a traitor in the service. River, having copied the contents of Hobden's USB drive before delivering it to Regent's Park, realises it contains no information and manipulates a rival, James 'Spider' Webb, into confirming the same. She claims to have an operative embedded with the Sons of Albion who organised the kidnapping but will also facilitate the rescue. Standish and Roddy are able to identify the van being used by the Sons of Albion, as it is linked to a previous cover identity used by Black, and begin to track it.