In story terms, Reconstruction is set before Slow Horses, whereas Nobody Walks comes after The List and before Spook Street. COBRA meetings are arranged at a very early hour so that if its members make no progress they can at least claim that they have had very little sleep.

Louisa Guy goes to Pembrokeshire to find him; after all she had been in a relationship with Min, another slow horse and Lucas’ father. It is assumed that his grandfather, who rarely leaves the house, has mistaken him for an intruder and killed him. Slow Horses was published by Constable in 2010, but the firm declined the opportunity to publish the next book in the series in the United Kingdom due to disappointing sales of its predecessor. Thus compromised, Lady Di is forced to go on the run, and has to reach out to the one person she would least like to ask for help… Jackson Lamb.Involving themselves in the drama, the slow horses soon realise that the machinations of The Park are even more twisted than they could ever have imagined. Like le Carré, whose wordcraft about spycraft included “mole,” “spook,” and “Moscow rules,” Herron’s got his own lingo, about “the hub” and “dogs” and “tiger teams” and “milkmen. The Secret Hours is set around the time of or after Bad Actors but includes a section set well before the series begins.

Even so, the reader steeped in spy fiction may discover that Herron’s beautifully detailed characters more closely resemble the grubby, penny-pinching creations of Len Deighton, those put-upon civil servants charged with defending the realm despite a complete absence of the noble impulse. Tonight at ten, chaos on all fronts for Liz Truss,” the BBC announced the night I boarded a red-eye to London. The central conceit of the books is that MI5, like any large organisation, needs somewhere to place its most hopeless employees, and this place is Slough House, a building just around the corner from the Barbican Centre. A lot of people had told me that, notwithstanding his denials, Herron must at some point have been a spy.The second season, based on Dead Lions, was filmed back-to-back with the first and premiered on 2 December 2022. In the light of what we are told at the beginning, much of what emerges comes from a most surprising source. There was a time when kickass – and we mean proper kickass – female protagonists were thin in the ground. Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English.