Not for me, couldn't get into this at all Didn't make it past the first couple of chapters

As with his previous ‘Slough House’ spook stories, Mick Herron launches London Rules with a simply gob-smacking opening chapter. You think you understand exactly what’s happening – just another terrorist atrocity among the daily diet of disaster – and then he pulls the rug right out from under with a single didn’t-see-that-coming sentence. It’s absurdly accomplished, and sets the tone for the fifth of these contemporary political commentaries.

If you haven’t met the Slow Horses before then London Rules will make little or no sense at all. Best to go back to the first in the series, to understand the dire circumstances of these second-rate spies. Each of the Slow Horses is damaged goods: alcoholic, inadequate, untrustworthy, addicted, impulsive or just plain incompetent. They’ve been buried in make-work in a scruffy sidestreet office in Central London, in theory kept well away from the important work of state security. Yet somehow they blunder their way into the most sensitive situations, and only the brilliant machinations of their unlovely leader – Jackson Lamb, a proper old-school spy – can save their bacon and prevent a national tragedy.

The plot is pretty much an excuse for some savage satire of the political classes. This time, Herron takes a determined poke at a Brexiteer who looks a lot like Nigel Farage; and a darling of the metropolitan elite, a Muslim candidate for mayor of the West Midlands. The department heads at MI5 spend most of their time in-fighting and undermining each other (thus leaving room for Jackson Lamb to manoeuvre), while the Slow Horses themselves are so remarkably disconnected from reality that one of them doesn’t even notice when someone tries to kill him.

It is terribly, terribly clever; a damning portrait of self-interest and political ambition. The action veers into slapstick at times yet Herron just about stops it becoming outright comedy. For every eye-rolling observation or absurdity, there’s just enough bleak reality to leave a bitter aftertaste.

If anything, Herron may be too successful – I struggled to relate to any of the key characters. Jackson Lamb is an astounding creation but it’s hard to find any sympathy for him, while the Horses themselves increasingly resemble cannon fodder. The story is superbly told – and it’s thoroughly entertaining to be in such witty company for a while – but these spy stories don’t have the gravitas or impact of Le Carre or Len Deighton. They’re like a grande latte: gorgeous to behold but essentially empty.

8/10

London Rules. What might those be? Something like George Smiley's Moscow Rules, perhaps - principles honed over many years, helping a spy to survive in hostile territory?

Well, kind of. We soon learn that "Rule one was to cover your arse..." which kind of makes sense and probably encapsulates whatever you might want to say in any longer set of espionage commandments. But when the bad guys begin to play the game, we're warned that if "they want to play London Rules, they should have known to write their wills first".

Rule One is particularly apt for Jackson Lamb's little team of Slow Horses, those would-be spies who have messed up somehow and whose careers have taken a turn into the shabby dead-end corridors of Slough House. The drug addict with anger management issues. The alcoholic. The hacker with just too much ego. And Lamb himself... we found out more here about what sent this magnificent monster to Slough House. (Lamb is a wonderful creation, the fast food eating, unhealthy, hard-drinking, chain-smoking cop dialled up to a hundred and eleven). The Horses are only there on sufferance. Nobody will look after them. They have to do it all for themselves. And also, they have to do it for all of us. Because it seems that when the gates of Hell open, the smooth operators of "Regent's Park" - home in these stories to MI5's best and brightest - can do nothing to swing them shut again.

A terrorist campaign is playing out, with mounting carnage - 14 dead, in one incident - and nobody knows who is behind it, or why. At the same time (the book is set post the EU Referendum), populist politicians have emerged from under their stones ("recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy") including one prominent Brexiteer with a wife who's a notorious tabloid columnist. Thank goodness this is fiction.

As the PM's favourite modernising Muslim campaigns for one of the new Mayorships in the North, the mounting violence might be the perfect opening for Dennis Gimball to make his name.

And then there's an attempt on the life of Slough House's very own, Roderick Ho, hacker extraordinaire, the Rodster, the Rodman (in his own estimation). We're permitted inside Ho's head (ugh) and might just wish his would-be killers well - except that doesn't sit well with Rule One, does it? So the Slow Horses gallop into action ("if you think our little gang of Jason Stillborns'll pass up the chance to mount their own private op, you're forgotten what testosterone smells like...")

What follows is a tautly plotted, often tense, always funny drama that delights in imagery and wordplay and animates its characters with some very shrewd insights. These very from the sly

"Louisa was telling Shirley her idea for a TV show, which would open with a view of Tom Hiddleston walking down a long, long, corridor, shot from behind. River waited. 'Then what?' he asked at last. But the women had misted over, and didn't hear him...",

"It was difficult arguing a point when you had no reliable information or accurate knowledge. Unless you were online, obviously."

to the poetic

"The day was packing its bags and tidying up... during the winter the day tires early, and is out of the door by five: coat on, heading west, see you tomorrow".

There's a nice line in what you might call espionage mythology - Herron notes that "there's nothing Spook Street enjoys more than a legend, unless it's a myth" - with references and nods to some of the classics including of course Le Carre's: like the secret in Le Carre's Smiley trilogy, the answer here lies in an old, old file and Lamb has to track down an old, old archivist to nail it who in, I think a nod to the "Registry Queens" of the Circus is now a "Queen of the Database". But the book builds its own mythology too, mentioning that "Lamb had done his time behind the Wall, and could still read the writing on it" and referring a number of times to the OB, the Old Bastard, grandfather to River, one of the Slow Horses and a man so lost in his legend that he's just that, just lost. The OB was at the centre of the previous book, Spook Street, and it's good to see him still waiting in the wings.

Herron also displays a nicely jaundiced view of the referendum's aftermath ("a frenzy of backstabbing, treachery and double-dealing on a scale not seen since the Spice Girls' reunion"). One of its unforeseen consequences, notes the PM in this book, "was that it had elevated to positions of undue prominence any number of nasty little toerags. Ah well. The people had spoken." and (another Rule) "...when campaigning, lie your head off - the referendum's other great legacy..."

Overall this is a great, compelling read. It's a book that kept me up till 1 in the morning till I had finished it. I devoutly pray that the UK's safety isn't in the hands of anyone like the Slow Horses... or do I?

Any book that can make you laugh out loud in delight on a Ryan Air flight is one to be treasured. This is the firth Slough House novel, a series I have read with increasing delight as Mick Herron settles into his characters and in particular the irascible Jackson Lamb.

The novels are based around the people working in Slough House, the place spies go when they have blotted their copy book. Mick Herron is excellent on misdirection and sending you down blind alleys. The terrorist attack that opens the novel is a case in point.

This is an interestingly topical novel given the cyber leaking of sensitive papers, cover ups in high places and a North Korean presence, In spite of the very black comedy there seems to be a sense of real anger at the behaviour of politicians and major government institutions. One that makes you stop and think.

Wonderful one liners and some excruciatingly politically correct asides make this a joy to read.

I found this book very hard to read but also could not put it down. I loved the descriptions of dusk, nightfall and dawn at Slough House - they were almost poetic. I struggled to couple this with the foul language.

I had not read any of the previous books so did not know what to expect. I found the mix of characters fascinating and the glimpse of the spy world terrifying!!

I feel a little ambivalent about the experience and am not sure whether or not I will be reading anymore.

This is the fifth novel in the Slough House series and it is only getting better with time. I closed the book desperately wanting to read the next in the series. But, unfortunately, I probably have about a year to wait!

I just love the characters in these books, Herron does an amazing job of making them come alive on the page. Particularly Jackson Lamb who farts and scratches his way through the story unashamedly. I love him! I also have a soft spot for River as he was the character who set the scene for the first book in the series and he's the one who always seems to have the most sense in the team. Always seems to be quietly exasperated by the rest of his teammates.

Herron's writing is superb as usual. His use of language just sublime. I would recommend this book and this series to everyone who loves crime fiction, not just the spy genre.

Wow, the Slough House series by Mick Herron just gets better and better. The team of misfits led by Jackson Lamb have to overcome a terrorist cell and the threat that there may be a traitor amongst them. Wonderful writing, sparky dialogue, brilliant cast of characters - a joy to read.

The latset in the Jackson Lamb series. Seems a little more tongue in cheek than the others and I have to say, at time almost outrageously so. You'll see caricatures that you recognise from contemporary politics and whereas a few years ago you might have thought ah well, it's only fiction, unfortunately its fact now!

The book follows Herron's usual style of deadly serious with elements of farce. Nothing quite fits together until...well pick up the book and find out how Lamb's misfits get on. Still plenty of surprises for the slow horses as well as the reader

This is the second Mike Herron book I've read. Loved it; funny; true to life; descriptive.

Mick Herron has made a trademark of writing espionage fiction that features dry sarcasm. His characters’ banter flirts constantly with being too much, usually but not always coming down on the right side of the line. London Rules is his fifth book featuring the “slow horses” of MI5: no-hopers, alcoholics, fuck-ups and dickheads who have been reassigned to a bureaucratic hellhole in Aldersgate Street called Slough House in the vague hope that they’ll resign and save the Service the trouble of firing them. Jackson Lamb is the head of this dubious team; veteran readers of Herron will know and love him, although loveable is the last word you’d use to describe the man, whose characterisation is generally conveyed by his propensity to fart, drink, smoke, swear, eat takeaways, and make profoundly politically incorrect comments to everyone around him. This is mostly justified by the reader’s awareness that, although Lamb is a disgusting boor, he’s also shrewd and loyal: he usually knows what’s going on before his superiors at Regent’s Park do, and, unencumbered by political ambition, can often make better and faster decisions. One doesn’t necessarily read Herron for the plots, which are usually flashy but shallow; London Rules is a decent stab at plotting, though, with the most shocking opening since Slow Horses. (It also borrows from that book’s clever reversal of our expectations about what can be allowed to happen in developed nations vs. developing ones.) Spook Street, the book before this in the series, was a return to form after two lesser outings, and London Rules suggests that Herron remains on the top of his fairly specific game.

Yet again Mick Herron delivers a top-notch spy thriller, with humour, irony and bang up to date politics and intrigue. Slough house is the best place for has been spies who actually still have the brains to be spies but are a bit clumsy and emotionally damaged, this makes it all the more fun. Please read, you'll love it

Another super tale of Jackson Lamb and his motley crew of "failed" spooks. The search for the protagonists of a terror attack proceeds with lashings of wicked humour,plot twists and a searing denouement. A couple of potential new recruits to the team appear but we will have to wait for the next instalment. Excellent.

What is to done with intelligence officers who are not very intelligent, who are an embarrassment to their employer or are otherwise damaged? In Mick Herron’s genre-bending sequence of comedy spy thrillers (of which London Rules is the fifth) they are banished to Slough House, a depressing outstation of the secret service where they can be forgotten without any risk of Employment Tribunals and where they while away their days doing non-jobs and hoping for redemption.
These misfits include drug abusers with anger management issues, recovering alcoholics, narcissistic computer hackers and a possible psychopath. And they are all strangely vulnerable, not least because they are all mismanaged (and protected) by Herron’s most wonderful comic creation, the grotesque Jackson Lamb. Lamb is a wonderfully politically incorrect, utterly cynical spymaster with disgusting personal habits and a prodigious appetite for booze, fags and takeaways.
This is why you should buy London Rules: the characterisation and dialogue are laugh-out- loud funny. Leaving aside the sleeper cell of quarrelsome North Korean terrorists whose pursuit and capture shape the storyline, the more entertaining villains are an outrageous populist politician and his wife, a tabloid columnist and also the duplcitious deputy head of the secret service. Add to this, a weak prime minister battling with Brexit and a bicycling Muslim Mayor and the potential for satire allows for some crackling one-liners. While the plotting may be far-fetched, it is also so contemporaneous and fast-paced that readers can suspend disbelief and keep turning the pages to see how the Slough House misfits stumble to save the day.
Highly recommended.

A terrorist incident in a country village seems to involve a new unidentified organisation. How this is related to assassin attempts on the slow horse computer geek provides the plot for this instalment of the story of slough house. It provides a story of old hidden secret service files of possible operational strategies for destabilisation of a regime that are being activated in the UK. The slow horses attempts at protecting their man gets them drawn into knowing more than is politically desirable and so it provides intricate and exciting story of how events unfold and how the slow horses end up be being the heroes and so ensuring their survival.

Won’t be reading this so unable to provide any sort of review but would not recommend this author to anyone, sorry, just too dull!

The fifth in the Slough House/Jackson Lamb spy series, London Rules opens with a massacre in a Derbyshire village, followed, bizarrely, by an attack on a penguin enclosure. After an assassination attempt on tech geek Roddy Ho, Slough House gets dragged into the action.
To muddy the waters it all seems linked to a smear campaign against a Muslim mayoral candidate by the leader of an anti-EU party and his tabloid hate columnist wife (who could they be based on?).
Whereas le Carré and Deighton had the black and white, good and evil of The Cold War, Herron’s spies are as wary of their own security service as foreign ones. They also bring more humour to the proceedings than their predecessors and The Slough House crew now feel the reader’s own familiar work colleagues, with their quirks and foibles.
As Jackson Lamb becomes ever more snide and overbearing, we have hints about the spy he once was and the man he might have been, had it not been for…we’re left to guess. Perhaps the next book will disclose what turned him from top spy to flatulent ogre. Until then London Rules is as good as any in the series and I can’t wait for more.

"Recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy", Mick Herron observes quite early on in London Rules and, watching our political leaders on the TV News most nights, you'd begin to worry that, like political satire elsewhere, Herron's Jackson Lamb/Slough House series might lose something of an edge in what has up to now managed to be both uproariously funny and deadly serious. In the real world, the balance hasn't always been quite as favourable.

Mick Herron then has no option but to introduce a few more lunatics into London Rules in addition to the cognitively challenged crew in the dump heap of the Secret Service in Slough House. They however all have good reasons why they've ended up monitoring library records across the country for anyone reading "extremist literature" or cross-checking electoral rolls against properties as an unlikely way of listing potential terrorist safe houses; incompetence, personality failings and various addictions. While not valued in the Secret Service, there are careers where such qualities could be considered an advantage; notably politics, being Prime Minister of the UK or President of the United States.

Mick Herron's recalibration of the limits of political lunacy in London Rules however include a Nigel Farage-influenced character, who loves to keep himself in the limelight and has recently been instrumental in swaying public opinion over to favouring a self-destructive Brexit in a recent referendum. He has a Katie Hopkins/Sarah Vine-like wife, Dodie, who writes inflammatory articles that further Dennis's political aspirations, and at present the target of their ire is a popular Muslim politician close to the PM, who they intent to denounce for apparent connections to terrorism.

There's another kind of political lunacy that has become more immediate even since the last Jackson Lamb novel, Spook Street, and that's the frequency of terror attacks on the streets of the UK. There's a terrorist unit operating in this latest book, following a plan that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense - from wiping out a small village in Derbyshire to blowing up penguins in an enclosure at the zoo - but perhaps their most unfathomable action is an attempted hit to take out Roderick Ho, one of Jackson Lamb's unhappy little team in Slough House.

Now, anyone who has read previous Jackson Lamb books will understand the implications of that revelation and connected it optimistically to the fact that Slough House personnel have a tendency to get whacked every now and again - but I would caution against getting your hopes up just yet. For the uninitiated, Roderick Ho is, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of an arsehole, but a useful one, since he is also something of a wizard on the computer. Unfortunately both those characteristics come into play here, and clearly Roderick Ho has hacked into somewhere he shouldn't have. The fact that he has been boasting of dating a hot Asian girlfriend Kim should also have raised not just disbelief, but suspicion, but then, the Slough House crew aren't called 'slow horses' for nothing.

That's the plot of London Rules in very basic outline. To say much more would be to spoil the delights, thrills, spills and twists of that follow, although the real delights are not so much in the plotting and satire as principally in Herron's writing, in the language, in the humour and in the profanity-laden and politically incorrect one-liners generously scattered throughout. The insight into the ways of the political mindset, manoeuvring is just as acute as ever, Herron refining them into the unwritten 'London rules' where rule one is "cover your arse". Speaking of which, Jackson Lamb is as foul as ever, and is actually a lot more active than his pestilent corpulent form usually permits. Then again, he's particularly challenged in this latest adventure when the actions of his staff result in an accidental death that takes their incompetence to a new level.

While there's still a great deal to enjoy in Mick Herron's wicked satire of the UK political establishment and the intelligence services, it does appear that the Jackson Lamb series has slowed down a little here, or, as I speculated at the start of the review, it could be a case where the absurdity and turmoil in current world affairs is really far beyond anything even Mick Herron could parody. If you've been following the series, London Rules might not register as much of an impact as some of the previous books - you can't whack a major character in the series every book, although Herron certainly tries - but another visit to Slough House is always welcome and it's still more comedy and up-to-the minute satire than just about anything else out there. Apart from what the UK government are giving us in real-life, of course.

This is the 5th book in the 'Slough House' series by author Mick Herron. Slough House is a dumping ground for British intelligence agents who have messed up a case. The "slow horses," are given menial tasks rather than be trusted on bigger cases.
I found the 1st book I read in this series OK but although loving the idea of Slough House and the relegated spies was not fully committed to reading further books. In spite of my doubts I decided to carry on regardless and I am so pleased I did. For me the series has developed and the characters have become endearing. The more I read of this series the more I like it and I never anticipated when I started book 1 that I would be looking forward to more of authors Mick Herron's work. This is yet another successful novel following the adventures of the rejected spies .
I would like to thank Net Galley and John Murray Press for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I found some aspects of London Rules disappointing.

The scene-setting device that he started in an earlier volume with a cat creeping through the rooms of Slough House was continued here with the dawn, the dusk and the dark used at various points in the narrative and I found it very irritating an unoriginal. Enough of that please.

I also found that the setting in a period where we are clearly modern day (obligatory sneer at Brexit, thankfully only 1 egregious example), but the UK still has a male PM a bit silly, and the PM is such a marginal figure that his/her gender could have easily been skated over with a tiny bit of invention.

The central plot idea of the list was also very thin - what exactly would SSD have proved if they'd pulled it off ? Rather unbelievable as were several other happenings.

And finally on the complaints side I found there was very little continued development of the established characters which I found surprising, especially with River who seems to be going backwards if anything especially as he doesn't really deserve to be a slow horse anyway. I don't really care much for the other characters either, except the one we're left wondering about at the end...

OTOH the satire is biting and very relevant for today's Britain and the dialogue is brilliant. Jackson Lamb is an inspired creation and some of his exchanges with Flyte, Taverner and especially Molly are comic genius that had me laughing out loud.

From the complaints you might think I hated it, but that's far from true as you can see from my 4* rating. I've loved the series and just think that the standards have dropped a bit. Maybe with success he's been asked to produce the next volume more quickly and is edited less thoroughly, so let's hope the next one is back to full 5* standard.

London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one.
Cover your arse.
Regent's Park's First Desk, Claude Whelan, is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions himself.
Meanwhile, the country's being rocked by an apparently random string of terror attacks, and someone's trying to kill Roddy Ho.
Over at Slough House, the crew are struggling with personal problems: repressed grief, various addictions, retail paralysis, and the nagging suspicion that their newest colleague is a psychopath. #.
It's a good job Jackson Lamb knows the rules. Because those things aren't going to break themselves.
Another good read, it’s taken me a while to warm to the series but I’ve finally got there & really enjoyed this book the fifth in the series. A well written novel that ‘got going’ faster than the previous books & I found myself absorbed. Well portrayed characters added to my enjoyment. Whilst it could be read as a stand alone book I’d recommend reading the earlier books so you can appreciate the characters & wit

My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read