Love the concept. Slough House is a place for has-been spies who made mistakes in the field and are too young to be pensioned off. Off course they get up to mischief and amidst their shenanigans crimes get solved. Funny and plenty of red herrings. Recommended.

Spies don’t get sacked when they do something really bad, they just get sent to Slough House, tag line “might as well be in Slough” to do thankless dull tasks along with the other Slow Horses run by the ‘lazy slob’ Jackson Lamb. Until they get given something slightly out of the ordinary to do that seems to be connected to the kidnapping and potential online beheading of a young boy of Pakistani heritage by an extreme right wing gang. Cue the chance for the spies who are better at their job than the ones who always put the next rung of the career ladder before the task in hand, to prove that they aren’t so slow after all. Entertaining spy thriller, Jackson Lamb’s my kind of hero!

3.75 Stars
Slough House is a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who've screwed up: left a service file on a train, say, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They're the service's poor relations - the slow horses - and most bitter among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.
But when a young man is abducted, and his kidnappers threaten to behead him live on the internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself.
I found the book hard to get into but I did persevere & it did get better. The pace was slow to begin with & I found it a struggle. The characters were well portrayed but I can’t say I really liked them.
My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read

Sadly I was not able to really get into these, lauded though they have been. The odd quirky character is fine but going OTT on the bizarre characters filling this ensemble detracted from what could have been a great plot, really contemporary.

I eventually got around to starting this series as each new follow-up has made it increasingly urgent. It took a couple of chapters to get into the style of writing and the way the sentences were structured, however once I got into the swing of it I was hooked. Yes some of it is seemed unbelievable, but then I’m not a member of the Intelligence Agency so who am I to know what is plausible and what isn’t?
I thoroughly enjoyed it so I’ve just bumped book 2 a few places up my to-read pile.

Good slant on the traditional spy yarn. The stars of this show have all made unforgivable errors and have been consigned to a backwater office performing mundane useless tasks in the hope they will resign and move on.All this is overseen by an overweight obstreperous former agent hated by all. Told with a great sense of humour this is superior stuff!

I am sorry to say that this series is not for me. I enjoyed some of the very British understatement but I struggled to identify with the characters or the plot. I found that I couldn't like the characters. I requested this book having read positive reviews so I acknowledge the opinions of others that this is a riveting series but it is not my type of story.