Mick Herron’s Slow Horses – The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

Let’s talk a little about Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series from Soho Press. You can find these espionage novels in the Web Store, and you might want to consider pre-ordering Slough House, the seventh in the series. Don’t worry. By the February release date, the Christmas mess in the delivery system should be over. https://bit.ly/3p0a8bZ

Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce, and Olivia Cooke Join Gary Oldman in Apple’s “˜Slow Horses’ With a star-studded Apple TV show filming in London, a new 10th anniversary edition of Slow Horses in stores now, and a new novel, Slough House, releasing in February, there has never been a better moment to discover the smartest, most prescient espionage series being written today.

I’m actually quoting from a recent press release for Slough House.

Mick Herron is the most award-nominated and award-winning espionage writer of the last quarter-century and that’s not hyperbole. Between CWA Daggers and a myriad of other prestigious trophies, Herron has enough hardware to create an Iron Throne of crime fiction awards—and he is just hitting his stride.

Talking to him you would not realize any of this. Charmingly self-deprecating, he is more likely to lament that his series of books about incompetent spies, careerist bureaucrats, and the white power underpinnings of Alt-Right political movements were not instead completely irrelevant. Yet Herron has found himself nearly perfectly describing a global political zeitgeist for the last decade with uncanny prescience. If the books were not so smartly funny and filled with memorable characters, they would almost be unbearably sobering.

Instead, they are a guiltless antidote for our times, somehow providing mirthful respite and politically engaged reading at the same time.

Slough House (Soho Crime | February 9^th, 2021) is the perfect book to begin this necessary series. Eponymously titled after the series itself, it serves as both an excellent introduction and a thrilling series installment. Truly, you can pick up any book in this series and understand what all the fuss is about. If you’re of a more completionist mindset, then you must start at the beginning with Slow Horses, which Soho Crime has conveniently reissued in a 10^th anniversary edition for Fall 2020, including a retrospective introduction by the author and an exclusive short story, “The Last Dead Letter.”

Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of the Slough House espionage series, four Oxford mysteries, and several standalone novels. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.