Slow Horses

Mick Herron’s Slow Horses was published in 2010 and is the first novel in Herron’s Slough House series of spy thrillers, which includes eight novels and several associated novellas. Slough House pays homage to many of the conventions of the spy thriller novel while simultaneously subverting them. Set in a specifically British setting and drawing on particularly British spy novel tropes and sardonic humor, Slow Horses explores the nature of second chances, personal motivation, and heroes and antiheroes.

Slow Horses was longlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award 2010. It was adapted as a series for Apple TV+ in 2022, for which Herron was jointly awarded the USC Libraries Scripter Award 2023.

This guide uses the 2020 Soho Press paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material contains portrayals of racist and sexist attitudes and language, and expletives that this guide makes reference to. Both the source material and the guide contain material relating to alcohol dependency, extremist terrorist activity, kidnapping, threat, violence, violent death, death by suicide, and gory detail.

Plot Summary

Slow Horses follows the story of Jackson Lamb and his team of agents, all of whom have been sent to work at Slough House, an offshoot of MI5, after being exiled from the Regent’s Park HQ for various offenses.