“From the Intelligence Service purgatory that is Slough House, where disgraced spies are sent to see out the dregs of their careers, Jackson Lamb is on his way to Oxford, where a former spook has turned up dead on a bus. Dickie Bow was a talented streetwalker once, good at following people and bringing home their secrets. He was in Berlin with Lamb, back in the day. But he’s not an obvious target for assassination in the here and now. On Dickie’s phone Lamb finds the last message he ever left, which hints that an old-time Moscow-style op is being run in the Intelligence Service’s back-yard. Once a spook, always a spook, and even being dead doesn’t mean you can’t uncover secrets. Dickie Bow might have tailed his last target, but Lamb and his crew of no-hopers are about to go live.”
Like a lot of classic cozy whodunits,
I do have an appreciation for some British Cold War Spy novels. Not sure all of
them work, but what Harron does here in Dead Lions –the second volume in his Slough House
series- is marries those old post WWII spy thrillers with today’s War on
Terror. Jackson Lamb maybe a relic from a bygone era – a Cold War Spy-
surrounded by the more modern spy’s who are dealing with the Putin-era, but
this is probably what made the first two books work so well, and why the
audience of readers may be a bit diverse in age. So we get a bunch of satire,
with human condition commentary on politics, on dealing with both the espionage
of the Cold War and on the politics and espionage of the modern era.
While Lamb is written somewhat as a genius, he does not come off as totally brilliant spy. His superiors hate him, but I think mostly because he is the typical trope character of an “unconventional” spook, one who uses instinct and memory versus computers and algorithms. The plot moves swiftly, and it’s hard to guess where it’ll go, with more human characters than most spy writers are willing to create. In ways, Herron’s characters remind of what Stephen King does –he fleshes out, gives life, to all the characters –even the incidental ones. They’re all flawed and speak like regular people. And then there is the fart jokes…