This series just gets better and better. Mick Herron has excelled himself with this latest chapter in the chronicles of life in Slough House. A terrific read!

London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one.

Cover your arse.

Yet another fantastic book in the Jackson Lamb series from Mick Herron.

I really don’t know how he does it, yet another book that kept me guessing and was action packed with things going on. There’s always a twist and nothing is as straightforward as it seems. I love the fact that we see more of J.K. Coe in this one and see the character develop further. And the return of the characters that I’ve come to like and feel close to now.

I also love the comedy in the books too - I had more laugh out loud moments. It’s not just drama and comedy that is brought though as the sadness felt by River over his grandads condition is done really well and comes across the pages to me as a reader.

The downside to this book is the fact that I’m now fully up to date so will have to try to wait patiently for the next instalment from the Slow Horses... I really hope I don’t have to wait too long!!

Not for me, couldn't get into this at all Didn't make it past the first couple of chapters

As with his previous ‘Slough House’ spook stories, Mick Herron launches London Rules with a simply gob-smacking opening chapter. You think you understand exactly what’s happening – just another terrorist atrocity among the daily diet of disaster – and then he pulls the rug right out from under with a single didn’t-see-that-coming sentence. It’s absurdly accomplished, and sets the tone for the fifth of these contemporary political commentaries.

If you haven’t met the Slow Horses before then London Rules will make little or no sense at all. Best to go back to the first in the series, to understand the dire circumstances of these second-rate spies. Each of the Slow Horses is damaged goods: alcoholic, inadequate, untrustworthy, addicted, impulsive or just plain incompetent. They’ve been buried in make-work in a scruffy sidestreet office in Central London, in theory kept well away from the important work of state security. Yet somehow they blunder their way into the most sensitive situations, and only the brilliant machinations of their unlovely leader – Jackson Lamb, a proper old-school spy – can save their bacon and prevent a national tragedy.

The plot is pretty much an excuse for some savage satire of the political classes. This time, Herron takes a determined poke at a Brexiteer who looks a lot like Nigel Farage; and a darling of the metropolitan elite, a Muslim candidate for mayor of the West Midlands. The department heads at MI5 spend most of their time in-fighting and undermining each other (thus leaving room for Jackson Lamb to manoeuvre), while the Slow Horses themselves are so remarkably disconnected from reality that one of them doesn’t even notice when someone tries to kill him.

It is terribly, terribly clever; a damning portrait of self-interest and political ambition. The action veers into slapstick at times yet Herron just about stops it becoming outright comedy. For every eye-rolling observation or absurdity, there’s just enough bleak reality to leave a bitter aftertaste.

If anything, Herron may be too successful – I struggled to relate to any of the key characters. Jackson Lamb is an astounding creation but it’s hard to find any sympathy for him, while the Horses themselves increasingly resemble cannon fodder. The story is superbly told – and it’s thoroughly entertaining to be in such witty company for a while – but these spy stories don’t have the gravitas or impact of Le Carre or Len Deighton. They’re like a grande latte: gorgeous to behold but essentially empty.

8/10

London Rules. What might those be? Something like George Smiley's Moscow Rules, perhaps - principles honed over many years, helping a spy to survive in hostile territory?

Well, kind of. We soon learn that "Rule one was to cover your arse..." which kind of makes sense and probably encapsulates whatever you might want to say in any longer set of espionage commandments. But when the bad guys begin to play the game, we're warned that if "they want to play London Rules, they should have known to write their wills first".

Rule One is particularly apt for Jackson Lamb's little team of Slow Horses, those would-be spies who have messed up somehow and whose careers have taken a turn into the shabby dead-end corridors of Slough House. The drug addict with anger management issues. The alcoholic. The hacker with just too much ego. And Lamb himself... we found out more here about what sent this magnificent monster to Slough House. (Lamb is a wonderful creation, the fast food eating, unhealthy, hard-drinking, chain-smoking cop dialled up to a hundred and eleven). The Horses are only there on sufferance. Nobody will look after them. They have to do it all for themselves. And also, they have to do it for all of us. Because it seems that when the gates of Hell open, the smooth operators of "Regent's Park" - home in these stories to MI5's best and brightest - can do nothing to swing them shut again.

A terrorist campaign is playing out, with mounting carnage - 14 dead, in one incident - and nobody knows who is behind it, or why. At the same time (the book is set post the EU Referendum), populist politicians have emerged from under their stones ("recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy") including one prominent Brexiteer with a wife who's a notorious tabloid columnist. Thank goodness this is fiction.

As the PM's favourite modernising Muslim campaigns for one of the new Mayorships in the North, the mounting violence might be the perfect opening for Dennis Gimball to make his name.

And then there's an attempt on the life of Slough House's very own, Roderick Ho, hacker extraordinaire, the Rodster, the Rodman (in his own estimation). We're permitted inside Ho's head (ugh) and might just wish his would-be killers well - except that doesn't sit well with Rule One, does it? So the Slow Horses gallop into action ("if you think our little gang of Jason Stillborns'll pass up the chance to mount their own private op, you're forgotten what testosterone smells like...")

What follows is a tautly plotted, often tense, always funny drama that delights in imagery and wordplay and animates its characters with some very shrewd insights. These very from the sly

"Louisa was telling Shirley her idea for a TV show, which would open with a view of Tom Hiddleston walking down a long, long, corridor, shot from behind. River waited. 'Then what?' he asked at last. But the women had misted over, and didn't hear him...",

"It was difficult arguing a point when you had no reliable information or accurate knowledge. Unless you were online, obviously."

to the poetic

"The day was packing its bags and tidying up... during the winter the day tires early, and is out of the door by five: coat on, heading west, see you tomorrow".

There's a nice line in what you might call espionage mythology - Herron notes that "there's nothing Spook Street enjoys more than a legend, unless it's a myth" - with references and nods to some of the classics including of course Le Carre's: like the secret in Le Carre's Smiley trilogy, the answer here lies in an old, old file and Lamb has to track down an old, old archivist to nail it who in, I think a nod to the "Registry Queens" of the Circus is now a "Queen of the Database". But the book builds its own mythology too, mentioning that "Lamb had done his time behind the Wall, and could still read the writing on it" and referring a number of times to the OB, the Old Bastard, grandfather to River, one of the Slow Horses and a man so lost in his legend that he's just that, just lost. The OB was at the centre of the previous book, Spook Street, and it's good to see him still waiting in the wings.

Herron also displays a nicely jaundiced view of the referendum's aftermath ("a frenzy of backstabbing, treachery and double-dealing on a scale not seen since the Spice Girls' reunion"). One of its unforeseen consequences, notes the PM in this book, "was that it had elevated to positions of undue prominence any number of nasty little toerags. Ah well. The people had spoken." and (another Rule) "...when campaigning, lie your head off - the referendum's other great legacy..."

Overall this is a great, compelling read. It's a book that kept me up till 1 in the morning till I had finished it. I devoutly pray that the UK's safety isn't in the hands of anyone like the Slow Horses... or do I?

Any book that can make you laugh out loud in delight on a Ryan Air flight is one to be treasured. This is the firth Slough House novel, a series I have read with increasing delight as Mick Herron settles into his characters and in particular the irascible Jackson Lamb.

The novels are based around the people working in Slough House, the place spies go when they have blotted their copy book. Mick Herron is excellent on misdirection and sending you down blind alleys. The terrorist attack that opens the novel is a case in point.

This is an interestingly topical novel given the cyber leaking of sensitive papers, cover ups in high places and a North Korean presence, In spite of the very black comedy there seems to be a sense of real anger at the behaviour of politicians and major government institutions. One that makes you stop and think.

Wonderful one liners and some excruciatingly politically correct asides make this a joy to read.

I found this book very hard to read but also could not put it down. I loved the descriptions of dusk, nightfall and dawn at Slough House - they were almost poetic. I struggled to couple this with the foul language.

I had not read any of the previous books so did not know what to expect. I found the mix of characters fascinating and the glimpse of the spy world terrifying!!

I feel a little ambivalent about the experience and am not sure whether or not I will be reading anymore.

This is the fifth novel in the Slough House series and it is only getting better with time. I closed the book desperately wanting to read the next in the series. But, unfortunately, I probably have about a year to wait!

I just love the characters in these books, Herron does an amazing job of making them come alive on the page. Particularly Jackson Lamb who farts and scratches his way through the story unashamedly. I love him! I also have a soft spot for River as he was the character who set the scene for the first book in the series and he's the one who always seems to have the most sense in the team. Always seems to be quietly exasperated by the rest of his teammates.

Herron's writing is superb as usual. His use of language just sublime. I would recommend this book and this series to everyone who loves crime fiction, not just the spy genre.

Wow, the Slough House series by Mick Herron just gets better and better. The team of misfits led by Jackson Lamb have to overcome a terrorist cell and the threat that there may be a traitor amongst them. Wonderful writing, sparky dialogue, brilliant cast of characters - a joy to read.

The latset in the Jackson Lamb series. Seems a little more tongue in cheek than the others and I have to say, at time almost outrageously so. You'll see caricatures that you recognise from contemporary politics and whereas a few years ago you might have thought ah well, it's only fiction, unfortunately its fact now!

The book follows Herron's usual style of deadly serious with elements of farce. Nothing quite fits together until...well pick up the book and find out how Lamb's misfits get on. Still plenty of surprises for the slow horses as well as the reader

This is the second Mike Herron book I've read. Loved it; funny; true to life; descriptive.

Mick Herron has made a trademark of writing espionage fiction that features dry sarcasm. His characters’ banter flirts constantly with being too much, usually but not always coming down on the right side of the line. London Rules is his fifth book featuring the “slow horses” of MI5: no-hopers, alcoholics, fuck-ups and dickheads who have been reassigned to a bureaucratic hellhole in Aldersgate Street called Slough House in the vague hope that they’ll resign and save the Service the trouble of firing them. Jackson Lamb is the head of this dubious team; veteran readers of Herron will know and love him, although loveable is the last word you’d use to describe the man, whose characterisation is generally conveyed by his propensity to fart, drink, smoke, swear, eat takeaways, and make profoundly politically incorrect comments to everyone around him. This is mostly justified by the reader’s awareness that, although Lamb is a disgusting boor, he’s also shrewd and loyal: he usually knows what’s going on before his superiors at Regent’s Park do, and, unencumbered by political ambition, can often make better and faster decisions. One doesn’t necessarily read Herron for the plots, which are usually flashy but shallow; London Rules is a decent stab at plotting, though, with the most shocking opening since Slow Horses. (It also borrows from that book’s clever reversal of our expectations about what can be allowed to happen in developed nations vs. developing ones.) Spook Street, the book before this in the series, was a return to form after two lesser outings, and London Rules suggests that Herron remains on the top of his fairly specific game.

I found this book trying and over engineered. Parts are funny, parts are interesting but overall disentangling the clever literary devices became too much like hard work.
I'm sorry but not for me.

Yet again Mick Herron delivers a top-notch spy thriller, with humour, irony and bang up to date politics and intrigue. Slough house is the best place for has been spies who actually still have the brains to be spies but are a bit clumsy and emotionally damaged, this makes it all the more fun. Please read, you'll love it

Another super tale of Jackson Lamb and his motley crew of "failed" spooks. The search for the protagonists of a terror attack proceeds with lashings of wicked humour,plot twists and a searing denouement. A couple of potential new recruits to the team appear but we will have to wait for the next instalment. Excellent.

What is to done with intelligence officers who are not very intelligent, who are an embarrassment to their employer or are otherwise damaged? In Mick Herron’s genre-bending sequence of comedy spy thrillers (of which London Rules is the fifth) they are banished to Slough House, a depressing outstation of the secret service where they can be forgotten without any risk of Employment Tribunals and where they while away their days doing non-jobs and hoping for redemption.
These misfits include drug abusers with anger management issues, recovering alcoholics, narcissistic computer hackers and a possible psychopath. And they are all strangely vulnerable, not least because they are all mismanaged (and protected) by Herron’s most wonderful comic creation, the grotesque Jackson Lamb. Lamb is a wonderfully politically incorrect, utterly cynical spymaster with disgusting personal habits and a prodigious appetite for booze, fags and takeaways.
This is why you should buy London Rules: the characterisation and dialogue are laugh-out- loud funny. Leaving aside the sleeper cell of quarrelsome North Korean terrorists whose pursuit and capture shape the storyline, the more entertaining villains are an outrageous populist politician and his wife, a tabloid columnist and also the duplcitious deputy head of the secret service. Add to this, a weak prime minister battling with Brexit and a bicycling Muslim Mayor and the potential for satire allows for some crackling one-liners. While the plotting may be far-fetched, it is also so contemporaneous and fast-paced that readers can suspend disbelief and keep turning the pages to see how the Slough House misfits stumble to save the day.
Highly recommended.

A terrorist incident in a country village seems to involve a new unidentified organisation. How this is related to assassin attempts on the slow horse computer geek provides the plot for this instalment of the story of slough house. It provides a story of old hidden secret service files of possible operational strategies for destabilisation of a regime that are being activated in the UK. The slow horses attempts at protecting their man gets them drawn into knowing more than is politically desirable and so it provides intricate and exciting story of how events unfold and how the slow horses end up be being the heroes and so ensuring their survival.

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!

This is book five in the Slough House series, and like books 4, 3, 2, and 1, it is remarkably original in its own ways. One does not expect that Rosy-fingered Dawn will introduce the story as she steals through the rooms of sleepy Slough House, nor that her cousin, Dusk, will bookend the story, or that in-between times both Day and Night will carry the book’s time. This shouldn’t have fazed me, because it’s partly advice from Edith Wharton, whom I revere. In Herron’s hands, it seems to lean back towards Homer, but of course it doesn’t. It’s more like pastoral, but you have to ask yourself just what that means; it’s not as if Herron wrote cosy crime, or harked back in other ways to Golden Age fiction. Except for one thing: the luxurious quality of the most writerly of the Golden Age writers, with their strong senses of landscape and townscape, hill and sea. Even John Creasey—that formulaic bop-’em on the head plotter-- had a fine weakness for architecture, for London’s docks, and the countryside. Top-of-the-range P. D. James, too, could pause a plot to ask her readers to admire a particular building. My symptoms are probably common: read it once to find out if he's killed any darlings lately, and then read it again to admire his prose.

When this book opens (just before the Homeric detail) with ‘the killers’ in a village in Derbyshire there is already rich prose:

It was approaching noon, and the sun was as white as the locals had known it. Somewhere nearby, water tumbled over stones. The last time trouble had called here, it had come bearing swords.

Herron's ability to gesture toward, say, the Twentieth-Century Wars in a phrase, as a very old man watches death arrive, is as up-to-date as his references to British politics and current disasters. Already, before old Rosie ranges through Slough House there is good reason to sit up straight, turn back the pages, and start again. And so we do. Evidently, Herron is not the first person to open a novel with high drama. Nor is he the first who will set his scene aside in order to lash his ship’s wheel to keep his course steady. One is inclined to put such scenes aside, perhaps muttering ‘Kipling’ or ‘Hardy’.

And then we are at chapter two. Herron’s ability to catch a character and give us reasons to remember him or her, allows him room for his multiplicity to remain with us, especially absentees such as River Cartwright’s now dying grandfather or Marcus, the gambler, who is now dead. The slow horses are gathering, and the idiot savant, Roddy Ho, the geek, is about to bring the roof down on them all.

At this point I have to stop, because nothing I now report about this wonderful book should contain spoilers, and however strange the horses are, somehow we have sympathy for them (not Roddy Ho, ok). So I’ll say that those who were alive in Book four are still alive, but not immune to dangers we have seen before, which are deadly beyond their worst ideas. Oh, yes, this book opens eight months after Book Four closed and the higher ups of MI5, the jockeying MPs, the wannabes, shown so satirically, continue their scramble up the greasy poles. Thus far I have probably given the impression that this is a condition of England novel, or something like. It is, but that implies terror and terrorists, some well inside the government. To keep everything about this book straight, I had to read it twice. You may wish to do the same.

The fifth in the Slough House/Jackson Lamb spy series, London Rules opens with a massacre in a Derbyshire village, followed, bizarrely, by an attack on a penguin enclosure. After an assassination attempt on tech geek Roddy Ho, Slough House gets dragged into the action.
To muddy the waters it all seems linked to a smear campaign against a Muslim mayoral candidate by the leader of an anti-EU party and his tabloid hate columnist wife (who could they be based on?).
Whereas le Carré and Deighton had the black and white, good and evil of The Cold War, Herron’s spies are as wary of their own security service as foreign ones. They also bring more humour to the proceedings than their predecessors and The Slough House crew now feel the reader’s own familiar work colleagues, with their quirks and foibles.
As Jackson Lamb becomes ever more snide and overbearing, we have hints about the spy he once was and the man he might have been, had it not been for…we’re left to guess. Perhaps the next book will disclose what turned him from top spy to flatulent ogre. Until then London Rules is as good as any in the series and I can’t wait for more.