‘Dead Lions’ by Mick Herron

My Review (5 stars out of 5)

Slough House boss Jackson Lamb travels to Oxford to check what a dead body might be doing on a bus. When the corpse turns out to be former spy Dickie Bow, it sets Lamb wondering if the apparently assassinated spook left some sort of message, something that might help track down the man’s killer and whatever it was old Dickie might’ve been looking for. Following the discovery, River Cartwright is sent to a typically English village to investigate what, if anything, might be going on there. Meanwhile, two of his colleagues—Min and Louisa—are tasked with escorting a Russian oligarch while he negotiates a deal at a London landmark, a task that on the surface, appears unencumbered by excitement.

This is the second book in the Slough House series and it’s a cracker. Mr Herron’s writing is clever and witty and often had me chortling at Jackson Lamb’s one-liners. The action gets off to a steady pace and for a while it’s not clear where the story is going but when it all comes together it’s as clever as a hamster with a new wheel. Unlike other spy stories, Herron’s writing is fresh and eminently readable, bringing new life to an old genre—bringing it in from the cold, you might say.

A cracking good read that kept me entertained from the first page.

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