This novel opens with a bang – literally.  Once again, we are in a very recognisable part of London, a huge shopping centre, busy with families, teenagers, shop assistants and security staff, all enjoying an impromptu flash mob when suddenly it doesn’t ‘feel so good’ and the attack ‘would ever after mark the date as one of unanswered phone calls and uncollected cars’.
Whilst the shopping centre massacre is broadcast around the world, where is the redoubtable Catherine Standish, the woman who reassures and calms the jittery occupants of Slough House?  As we are taken once more into the sleazy domain of the ‘slow horses’, the MI5 rejects, it seems that Jackson Lamb has gone a step too far even for his resilient office manager – if anyone can ever ‘manage’ Jackson.  Having learnt something extremely hurtful at the end of the previous novel, she has clearly decided that enough is enough and has been replaced by Moira Tregorian, a woman designed to irritate and appal in equal measures.  Other than Moira, the usual suspects are back in their poky, grubby offices, joined by new recruit JK Coe, possibly one of the most uncommunicative people on the planet.  As is Mick Herron’s usual modus operandi, we’ll learn tiny snippets of information about his back story from time to time, just as we do with all of the other ‘slow horses’ and this is one of the features that makes this series so intriguing.
Once promising trainee Slough House member River Cartwright is dealing with problems closer to home than a terror attack – or so he, and we, think for much of the novel.  His beloved grandfather, once a highly revered member of the Intelligence Service, has dementia and River is worried that he’ll give away state secrets and be silenced once and for all by MI5.  After River is shot in the head by his grandfather and after the latter disappears, Jackson Lamb, always one to guard his empire, becomes fully involved in the affair which is, of course, far less straightforward than at first appears.
Several new characters are introduced in this novel, not least Claude Whelan, First Desk at the Park and so obviously a target for the machiavellian ‘Lady Di’ Taverner, and the fabulous looking Emma Flyte, new Head Dog, in charge of the Service’s internal police squad.  It’s clear that these women will not see eye to eye on very much at all and their exchanges amuse the reader almost as much as Jackson Lamb’s caustic comments.  Another highly enjoyable story; lots of twists and turns, plenty of human interest and an ever-present dose of very dark humour, Jackson Lamb style.  What’s not to love?
My thanks to NetGalley and John Murray (Publishers) for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

If you haven't dipped a toe in the murky waters of Mick Herron's Slough House spy series, you're seriously missing out.  No heroic derring do here, all done with a smirk and a single raised brow, these spies are broken and battered and bitter - but no less determined to do the jobs they trained for than any of their more exalted colleagues.   Another brilliant read, I can't wait for the series to continue.

I have now read all five of the available Jackson Lamb series.  This fourth book is, for some reason, the one I enjoyed the most.  This plot once again is rooted in the past.  There are some new characters and our familiar faces.  The back story is very important and I enjoyed the way the author blends past and present.  As with the whole series each book is an independent story, well worth reading.  It is enriched by having read the earlier books but this is not necessary.  Once again it is the interrelationships that are the focus for me.  There is a lot of humour and some pathos.  I highly recommend.

I have decided that spy stories are just not for me.

This is the fourth in Herron’s  series of satirical spy thrillers based around the activities of the slow horses of Slough House. I’ve read all the previous novels int he series, though this is the first I’ve reviewed. It can be read as a standalone, though reading the series is so much better.

The novels centre around Slough House, a satellite station of MI5 where the Service’s misfits and disgraced members - so called Slow Horses - are sent to serve out their time until they retire or resign. Lording it all over them is Jackson Lamb, an overweight, flatulent bully of a man, albeit one who deep down cares for his underlings. The Slow Horses themselves are a selection of well-drawn characters, who the author imbues with individual character flaws and foibles. Each is loveable and repellent in his or her own way.

Each novel in the series takes on the same format: something happens, a plot or disaster, and against all the odds the Slow Horses become embroiled and have to save the day. In Spook Street it’s a suicide bombing in a shopping centre, a flash mob having been organised only for the organiser - the bomber - to blow themselves up amidst the crowd. In a seemingly unrelated event, the grandfather of River Cartwright - perhaps the most “normal” of the Slow Horses -  a MI5 legend has an attempt made on his life and River takes it upon himself to find out why. Needless to say, these two plot threads link up and soon the Slow Horses find themselves in the middle of the investigation into the bombing. I won’t give away spoilers but needless to say that the bombing is not all it seems either and there’s a fiendish plot behind it all.

Supposedly there’s a distinction between “plot driven novels”, often dismissed as “genre” novels, and “character driven novels”, which are supposedly “literary”. This series of novels shows such a distinction to be meaningless. I’m sure most critics would class them as plot-driven, but to my mind the plots are always rather weak. Spook Street is no different, the plot is almost a MacGuffin, a device just to get the characters running around the place, chasing their tails. The fun is had in seeing the Slow Horses themselves, reading Jackson Lamb’s latest outrageous, non-PC statement. This isn’t a criticism at all, but an observation.

All in all this novel, as with the rest of the series, Spook Street is good fun and fresh take on the spy genre.

4 out of 5 stars

Yet another great read in the Mick heron series, which is  best read in order, I can speak from experience as I got the order wrong (not a serious problem, but the historical storyline of the characters is much eaasier to follow. Lots of  humour in all of these books, as well as serious storyline. A really enjoyable read.

This is the fourth book in the series. I found it humorous in places and action packed. The slow horses have a busy life which is a pleasure to read about.

Shows the intrigue and double standards that continue throughout our society.  Fast paced and interesting.

Why can't there be more stars? Five doesn't seem adequate to mark the excellence of this book! If Real Tigers ended with an anxious moment, Spook Street will properly shock you. It delivers such a body blow as to bring tears to your eyes. Yes, I cried, and more than once, if I'm honest. 

I feel a real connection with all our outcasts at Slough House and, whilst I revel in any action they get to be party to, I do fear for their safety. There's plenty of action here, tension rating is exceptionally high as well, and I know how swiftly they can slide into life threatening danger. This book, especially, pulls on the heart strings in a number of ways that sets it apart from the others in the series. I won't say what occurs but there is a gentle thawing for Jackson Lamb, too, that endears him (and his gruff ways) to the reader even more. The richness of this novel stems from the almost family like connection between the characters resident at Slough House. Yes, family but an honest, snarky and dysfunctional one, to be clear. 

I so look forward to a deep dive into London Rules, the next book, but dread it as it is the latest in the series and a harsh stopping point until another book comes out. I don't know how I will go on without Jackson and his merry band standing by to amuse and engross me.

This is another book in the Jackson Lamb series that does not disappoint! I was lucky enough to recently read all 4 of the series via netgalley, until I spotted it on there I had never even heard of the series. I’m so glad that I’ve found it. I have loved each book more than the last and I think it’s due to the fantastic characters that the author has developed, especially reading them back to back... I’ve grown to really like them. 

Spook street is another fast paced read which really kept me on my toes again, I even gasped out loud at one scene near the beginning as I couldn’t believe what had happened... only to realise as ever... it’s one of those twists! And I’m this books the twists just kept coming... there was one that I was so annoyed at myself for not guessing it before it was revealed... I’m usually way ahead!! Not with these books though, even having read the previous 3, I don’t seem to be able to predict what’s going to happen next! 

I can’t wait to read number 5!

Even though I toiled through the first 60 pages of each Jackson Lamb thriller before giving up, I was unable to find them in any way gripping or amusing and liked neither the characters nor the plots. Unfortunately, I had requested all four books of this series at once and was kindly given free copies by netgalley in return for an honest review.

https://www.librarything.com/work/17969685

Won’t be reading this so unable to provide any sort of review but would not recommend this author to anyone, sorry, just too dull!

Spook Street is the fourth book in this series and I have to say the author Mick Herron.  It is another well-written book and for a spy thriller, it had quite a few laugh out loud moments.
Another great read from this author and what makes this book special is how the author developed the characters and with the witty dialogue throughout makes this one book I am happy to recommend.

This is the 4th book in the 'Slough House' series by author Mick Herron. Slough House is a dumping ground for British intelligence agents who have messed up a case. The "slow horses," are given menial tasks rather than be trusted on bigger cases.
After a shaky start to this series I am now rapidly working my way through these books and having lots of enjoyment doing it. The more I read of this series the more I like it. Another adventure for the rejected spies who are continuing to grow on me the more I read. This series is  full of humour and  decent plots. On to the next book in the series.
I would like to thank Net Galley and John Murray Press for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Twenty years retired, David Cartwright can still spot when the stoats are on his trail. 
Jackson Lamb worked with Cartwright years ago. He knows better than most that this is no vulnerable old man. 'Nasty old spook with blood on his hands' would be a more accurate description.
'The old bastard' has raised his grandson with a head full of guts and glory. But far from joining the myths and legends of Spook Street, River Cartwright is consigned to Lamb's team of pen-pushing no-hopers at Slough House.
Another slow start but the pace did pick up. I enjoyed the dialogue & have come to like Lamb. The other characters were well portrayed. 

My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read

The second book to follow Slow Horses this time they are seconded into some seemingly low profile operation.. Meanwhile a bait has been laid to cause them to follow. Nothing is what it seems and it's all smoke and mirrors. and the mess that ensues with the casualties that results and how they escape from this mayhem  makes an exciting and riveting read.

Whose turn is it this time? You can always be sure that one of Jackson Lamb's team of bottom of the rung intelligence agents is going to get put through the wringer, tortured and beaten up pretty badly, or worse, take a bullet. As it happens, one of the regular 'slow horses' in the Slough House team gets whacked in Spook Street, permanently. Sorry for being blunt about it, but well, it goes with the territory, and there will always be plenty of other candidates to take their place in the secret service's dumping ground. Slough House is where the intelligence services demote those agents who need to be quietly 'let go', some of them having done time in the field and messed up really badly, others who will never be let anywhere near it. Since they can't be trusted to go back into normal society either, exile to Slough House means spending the rest of their days wading through reams of data to ensure that they never forget just how worthless they are. There's no place for sparing anyone's feelings here.

So when a slow horse is kidnapped, interrogated by the Dogs in the HQ at Regent's Park, dies in action or in mysterious circumstances that it's best not to make known to the general public (these things happen surprisingly frequently to a bunch of data miners), well, as I said, it goes with the territory and there's no point in taking it personally. In the last Slough House book (which seem to be recategorised now as the Jackson Lamb series), Real Tigers, it was Catherine Standish who ended up 'tested', caught up in a peculiar exercise as part of an internal power struggle that inevitably ended up going badly wrong (and how!), but it was River Cartwright who took the brunt of the fall-out. To be honest though, hardly any of the team (Jackson Lamb apart) came out of it unscathed. The experience did kind of serve to strengthen the team bond (Roderick Ho excepted obviously), even if all that really did was underline just how in-it-all-together at the bottom of the barrel the slow horses are.

Any yet, it still comes as a shock when one of Jackson Lambs' unhappy little group of misfits meets with a very sudden and nasty end - but obviously I'm not going to reveal here who that is.

The fact that it's a harsh and even callous world we are operating in here is exemplified by Roderick Ho, whose first response to the news of a dead colleague is to get in and cannibalise the computer of the recently deceased for parts to supercharge his own PC. So no, it's not Roderick Ho who takes a bullet - more's the pity some might say - but you didn't think Mick Herron was going to take the easy option on this one, did you? Far from taking the easy option in fact - we're dealing with pretty slippery characters and situations here - Mick Herron takes the more convoluted approach, so beware that nothing is as it seems and there are considerably more twists and turns that occur before we get to the end of Spook Street. There might be a new suit running the shop after the last debacle, but Lady Di Taverner is still up to her old tricks, so the potential for a messy situation of enormous proportions is more than likely.

Mick Herron's writing is viciously entertaining. In Spook Street he's as sharp as ever in the endlessly inventive witty exchanges of dialogue and put-downs - it really is laugh out loud funny - but he's also bang up to date in his observations of the nature of the 'post truth' world we live in. It might once have been the preserve of politicians and the intelligence services, but we are all living in this world now. And that can be a very dark place as we recognise even more so in Herron's latest spy thriller. Underneath the jet black humour and the blunt reactions (or lack of reactions) to what is going on, there's an air of sadness here, of bitterness and fear, of feeling powerless against greater forces beyond our control. Herron doesn't just manage to soak up the desperation of a team who are at the very bottom of the secret service heap, in them he encapsulates where we all stand in the greater scheme of things. Herron is the Chekhov of the Twitter age, the Tolstoy of a surveillance society, where focus groups and anger management courses and posted YouTube videos are the only weapons we have to empower us in our fight against very real fears and existential crises.

Well, obviously not the only weapons, else one of the Slough House crew wouldn't be getting whacked with a bullet in the head, but essentially Herron shows that human nature hasn't changed all that much, even if fear and terror comes to our door in different ways, and even if the politicians and their dogs operate in new media-savvy ways. A few familiar figures have slipped to the sidelines in Spook Street and there are a few new faces to the ranks, but the operations in power-grabbing, self-preservation, ass-covering and blame-gaming are very much in evidence. And yes, we are dealing with the now always topical subject of a terror attack in a major European city; London obviously being the city in question, the victim of a suicide bomber in the large Westacres shopping mall. If you think that's going to send the city into panic, it's nothing compared to the upheavals it causes in Spook Street, particularly when the facts of the attack and their roots to a secretive operation in France, start to come to light.

So there's not much more to be said about Spook Street. You know the old saying about what I'll have to do if I tell you? Well in this case, I don't think my life would be worth living if I gave away anything more about the plot. All that needs to be said is that Spook Street is classic Mick Herron. There's never a dull moment, and it's witty, dark, sinister and vaguely troubling. And one of the crew gets whacked. But maybe not in the way you think. Nothing is certain in this world. Best laid plans and all that. The only thing certain is that Jackson Lamb is his usual disagreeable self - to put it mildly, which he never does - rude, blunt and never lost for a one-liner put-down or a flatulent expression of his disdain. Based on where we've come so far, and the fact that Herron is on top of his game and always capable of coming up with inventive and credible twists that genuinely surprise, the only other certainty is that this latest Jackson Lamb thriller was always likely to be getting a five-star rating.

A massive terror attack on a London shopping mall may have shocked the capital, but Jackson Lamb is more concerned with goading his team of deadbeat spooks, the so -called slow horses. But when one of them appears to have been killed by his own grandfather, a former high-ranking MI5 agent, the trail of terror leads back to Jackson and his team. Ever twisting, fast-paced and shot through with the series’ typical gallows humour, Spook Street is the best in the series so far.

Fantastic, breathtaking, audacious and exhausting – but read the series in order for maximum enjoyment

Introducing Slough House and the Slow Horses for those coming to the series via Book 4 though I strongly suggest, starting with book 1, and getting to this one in sequence: 

The series follows a group of Z lister sppoks, and also the high fliers of the A listers of MI5, who run policy and do the high octane stuff. Slough House is where former MI5 personnel, who have fouled up in some way either through character defects or evidence of some kind of incompetence, are put out to paid grass. Someone has to do the boring stuff of videocam checks, and trawl through vehicle licence plates and phone records, and getting the disgraced ‘Slow Horses’ to do this, stops redundancy pay outs and legal cases. Chances are, the Slow Horse will resign due to extreme tedium, hence, no payout, and there will always be others to demote to Horsedom. To a man and woman, the Slow Horses regret their prior high flying status, and hope against hope that some kind of saving the world and defence of the realm activity will come their way, and they might, therefore return to the fold of MI5. In their own way, each of this fascinating group of misfits is more than capable

They are led by a monstrous, Rabelasian (at least in turns of various odoriferous bodily emissions and capacity to indulge alcohol, junk food and tobacco) man, Jackson Lamb. Lamb is the least lamb like creature imaginable. Irascible, bullying, grubby, obnoxious and lethal, sharp as a whole army of lasers and with,  despite his lack of obvious appeal, a great loyalty to the band of ‘joes’ he rules and insults. Despite the drudgery of desk work, the Slow Horses are still involved in dangerous activities. Over the course of the books some have died, new characters have come to take their places, and some, there from the start, are still with us, though the danger of their work makes the reader wonder from whence the heartache of losing a strange old friend from an earlier book, will come

Herron brings different Horses into the leaders of each book’s race, and some characters met much earlier might be very very slow horses, waiting their turn to gallop to the death or marginal glory finish.

Central to this book is the aging David Cartwright. Almost ‘First Desk’ during the Cold War, he is now living in quiet retirement in the country, beginning to slide into dementia. An elderly spook, becoming loose lipped and garrulous might have dangerous secrets to unwittingly spill. And there might be several interested in plugging such a leak before it happens.

I must confess to some small disappointment with the previous book in the series, Real Tigers, though not disappointed enough to not want to proceed on to the next.

Very happily, Spook Street has gone stratospheric in my estimation. So stratospheric that I had to stop reading at times because Herron had taken me to a place where I hardly dared to advance, because of fear and grief of what might be to come. A writer does something particularly brilliant when they take a reader to a place of ‘in denial’ – I don’t think I can bear to know more, I can’t bear to not know. Suspense, anxiety, on the edge.

All through the series, from the very first page of Slow Horses, Herron has thrown justified shocks, surprises, feints, and reverses at his readers. This one though, has him pretty well surpassing himself, because, of course, we are now invested in each Slow Horse. 
As ever I can’t give any information (or very little) on this one, as each reader deserves to read in innocence, in order to get the greatest level of involvement and commitment to each of Herron’s wonderful cast of characters

As in book 3 the main focus from which danger and bad deeds arise is internal – from within the organisation itself, where various individuals struggle for higher status and power over others. Some of the usual suspects are still to be found within MI5, but others are on the rise or fall. Danger of course also lurks without, from those who seek to undermine the system, but some of those within have shady ways of protecting the system, and shadier ways still of protecting their own selves.

The Horses themselves, flawed, flatulent, antisocial and strange as they may be, are still the ones with moral compasses – more than others who stalk these pages, they have a loyalty to each other, however much each of them may violently dislike or despise a fellow Horse

I am minded, whilst we now have a protracted wait whilst Herron decides how much further to ride his horses, to start a prior series by him, following the fortunes of a private detective, but with, no doubt his trademark signatures of sharp writing, wit, danger, strong characterisation, twisty plot – and surprises a plenty