Mick Herron

"Slough House is the MI5 branch where disgraced operatives are reassigned after they've messed up too badly to be trusted with real intelligence work. The 'Slow Horses, ' as the failed spies of Slough House are called, are doomed to spend the rest of their careers pushing paper, but they all want back in on the action. When one of their own is kidnapped and held for ransom, the agents of Slough House must defeat the odds, overturning all expectations...

"London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one: Cover your arse. At MI5 headquarters Regent's Park, First Desk Claude Whelan is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions himself: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number Ten; from the showboat's wife, a tabloid columnist, who's crucifying Whelan in...

"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....

A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information.
It’s also what happens just before you hit the ground.
 
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 café, he knows he’s witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions...

"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...

London's Slough House is where washed-up M15 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. But now the 'slow horses' have a chance at redemption. An old Cold War-era spy is found dead on a bus outside Oxford, far from his usual haunts. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient secrets that seems to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, and a decades-old conspiracy with a...

Tom Bettany, a British ex-spy crammed with dark skills, comes out of retirement when he learns his estranged son is dead. His quest leads him to the shadowy Vincent Driscoll, head of the software-design firm Liam worked for, and to the bizarre Dame Ingrid Tearney, head of the Intelligence Service, who is either worried that Bettany will discover something better kept under wraps or else wants Bettany to do some dirty work on her behalf. "Set in the...