Slow Horses is the disparaging and possibly unfair term that the favoured secret service operatives have given the less favoured agents located at Slough House. Not that that is the building’s real name, just another disparaging term applied to reflect the dead-end nature of the careers of those placed there, due to cockups, errors of judgement, personality defects, and malicious rivalry. The service hope that the misfits will resign saving the cost and embarrassment of sacking them.
River Cartwright is at Slough House following a monumental cockup during a training assessment, which he thinks, but cannot prove, was engineered by a rival. No doubt the other inhabitants have similar cases to plead, but only deaf ears to appeal to. They spend their days on routine, low priority, and seemingly meaningless tasks, sifting obscure data dumps or, in River’s case, sifting rubbish from a journalist’s bin.
Then an opportunity arises. Labyrinthine service politics means deputy head of service, ‘Lady Diana’ Taverner, needs some work doing off the record, and reckons Slough House can be relied on to do it to the required level of incompetence. However she has made a misjudgement; the Slow Horses shake off their torpor and rediscover a thirst for action.
The plot is the plot, too convoluted to precis here, but the strength of the book is in the half dozen or so Slow Horse characters and their back stories, and how they develop from a disparate, distrustful bunch of individuals (who each think the others deserve to be at Slough House) into a workable team.
It is the first of a
series, so resolution is partial, leaving scope for further books to continue
the ebb and flow of office politics and its effect on the fate of River
Cartwright and his colleagues (who now are at least on speaking terms). And as
the style is pleasing, if a little edgy, requiring the reader to pick up subtle
hints, there is much to recommend delving into further episodes.
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