Contains mild spoilers

Has it really all been going on this long? Slough House, somewhat oddly the seventh in the Slough House series, was written round about the time of Covid. But the political events that Mick Herron describes could be taking place right now: there’s a blurring in the boundaries between the private and public sector in a way that means extra power for the tech elite, there are marches involving people waving flags, there are cutting remarks about Nigel Farage. Herron isn’t being prophetic, we’ve just been living in this world for rather a long time now. What’s a little strange is that Peter Judd, the political villain, continues his post-political career and it becomes clear that he’s as much a hindrance to the secret service as he was when he was home secretary. We found in the short story The Catch that MI5 was being deployed to protect senior members of the Establishment against their own behaviour. Now, thanks to Judd, MI5 is less His Majesty’s Secret Service and more a plaything for the tech oligarchy. 

The sprawling nature of Mick Herron’s Slough House world, spanning novellas, short stories, and non-sequence companion full-length novels, means that the most pleasure is derived form reading all the material in order. The reader of Slough House will definitely benefit from reading the previous books first, not least because we renew acquaintance with characters we’ve not seen for a while. In one case a vignette enables Herron to suggest that there might be worse things in life than being banished to Slough House: it’s possible to mess things up even more seriously. And yet, even as you sink beneath the waves of your new life, your old existence might be back with further vengeance on its mind. For all that that the slow horses have been banished to oblivion and obscurity, they don’t half attract attention and adventure. River’s thinking about getting away, because River’s always thinking about getting away. He might not manage it: adventure has a habit of presenting itself.

For Diana Taverner has done a number of dodgy things, and not all of them relate to Peter Judd. Our favourite, useless spooks, are being hunted down. Now the horses are often on the defensive but normally their enemies are internal. This time, we don’t know at first who the enemies are. But it is Judd’s involvement which brings the possibility of enemy action, which is the most deadly. Taverner had been at the end of her tether. The UK government was trying to do spying on the cheap, or at least that’s how Taverner saw it. She wanted MI5 to get back in the game after some embarrassing reversals. Say what you like about Taverner, but having played the long game to attain her position, she wants to do the job as well as be the postholder. Judd by contrast is all about being – he wants the status without the responsibility. And if he is bored enough to want to do something, then his calculation will be to compute his benefit and any wider upside will be entirely accidental. I suppose we can contrast this approach to Jackson Lamb, who protests against the trappings of power and whose sole focus is the moral responsibility that a handler has to their Joe.

The bleakness of the combination of dead slow horses, corruption on a larger scale than before, an astonishingly sad ending, Herron’s general fury, and contemporary political parallels make this a darker novel than we’ve enjoyed in this series until now. But there are some ridiculously silly moments. Not just for the deliciously bathetic puncturing of Roddy Ho’s delusions – there is one amazing set-piece when River and Lech try to dispatch some bad guys that is worth the price of the book alone. Be aware that the ending is such that you’ll want to go straight into Bad Actors. Bingeing is not only for TV.

Check out all Cafethinking reviews of Slough House novels, novellas and short stories, plus episode reactions to series 5 of Slow Horses.