Lamb, however, is not entirely satisfied with the result of the inquest and cannot understand why Dickie should be so far away from where he lived. Dickie Bough has been found dead on a bus near Oxford, apparently following a heart attack. The events begin with the death of a former member of MI5, an old Cold War spy whom Jackson Lamb had known. It is a tale that is always absorbing, one not always easy to follow, but which retains the attention until the last page. It is a tale of events long ago as well of those of today, of old rivalries as well as new ones. The reason for the absentee is the subject of the cat and mouse game with which the author presents us. On this occasion it is noticeable that one of the occupants is no longer there. As it does so it encounters each of the denizens of the building, from the lowliest, Roderick Ho, the IT man on the ground floor to Jackson Lamb, the officer in charge of Slough House, on the third.Īt the end of the book the process is repeated, but this time the intruder is a mouse. He imagines a cat entering Slough House from Aldersgate Street and moving from room to room up the building. Mick Herron has a very neat way of introducing us to his characters. They were given mainly routine tasks to do by their betters in The Park, the intention being that they would eventually be driven to hand in their resignations. Possibly they might not have done anything wrong at all but had simply got in the way of a more ambitious colleague. In Catherine Standish’s case the error had been of a more personal kind – she had been an alcoholic. Min Harper had left an important file on an underground train. Slow horses is the name given to those members of the service whose careers have been blighted by an error of some kind. Its inhabitants are members of MI5 – not the real Premier League MI5, which is near Regents Park, but its poor Division 2 relation at an outpost in the city. Slough House and slow horses are associated by a pun which is deliberately not very good.
Dead Lions is the second book in a planned series of three about the inhabitants of Slough House in central London, the first, Slow Horses, having been a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger Award in 2010.
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