Mick Herron

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...

"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...

Dieter Hess, an aged spy, is dead, and John Bachelor, his MI5 handler, is in deep, deep trouble. Death has revealed that the deceased had been keeping a secret second bank account—and there’s only ever one reason a spy has a secret second bank account. The question of whether he was a double agent must be resolved, and its answer may undo an entire career’s worth of spy secrets.

"At Slough House-MI5's London depository for demoted spies-Brexit has taken a toll. The "slow horses" have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House wiped from Service records-and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets? With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's...

"What happens when an old spook starts to lose his mind? Do the Services have a retirement home for people who know too many secrets but don't remember they're secrets? Or does someone come to take care of the senile spy for good? These are the questions River Cartwright must ask himself as his grandfather--David Cartwright, a Cold War-era operative--starts to forget to wear pants, and starts believing everyone in his life is someone sent by Services...

If Spook Street is where spies live, Joe Country is where they go to die. In Slough House, the London outpost for disgraced MI5 spies, 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....

"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....