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Published May 2013
348 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
The CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage novel about disgraced MI5 agents who inadvertently uncover a deadly Cold War-era legacy of sleeper cells and mythic super spies.
London's Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they're called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle - not unusual in this line of work. One thing they all have in common, though, is they all want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there - even if it means having to collaborate with one another.
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. The despicable, irascible Jackson Lamb is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?
"Starred Review. Funny, clever... Genuinely thrilling. The novel is equally noteworthy for its often lyrical prose." - Publishers Weekly
"[Dead Lions] features some of the twistiest plotlines in crime fiction...[and] is beautifully written but also elegantly structured ... Ever since finishing Slow Horses, I've been waiting for a possible sequel. Now that it's here, I have the pleasure of experiencing it, along with the pang of having finished it." - International Noir Fiction
"Full of style and cynical humor ... Has all the punch-your-lights-out action of a movie thriller." - Read Me Deadly
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mick Herron is a British novelist and short-story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and the novella The List) and four Oxford mysteries (Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers), as well as the standalone novels Reconstruction, Nobody Walks, and This Is What Happened. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.
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