Mick Herron

Step into the grimy, brilliantly observed world of British intelligence with Mick Herron, the Oxford-based author whose Slough House series has been hailed as the finest British espionage fiction since John le Carré — a darkly comic, psychologically rich, and utterly gripping sequence of novels that follows the misfit MI5 agents exiled to a rundown London office known as Slough House, presided over by the magnificently slovenly, ruthlessly intelligent Jackson Lamb. Where other spy novels glamorise the intelligence world, Herron’s are set among the failures, the burned-out, and the bureaucratically disgraced — agents who made mistakes and have been put out to pasture in the hope they’ll resign, doing pointless make-work while the real spies operate elsewhere. The result is a series of extraordinary wit, moral complexity, and genuine thriller tension, adapted into a BAFTA-winning Apple TV+ series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. The series comprises Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country, Slough House, Bad Actors, and The Secret Hours. He has also written the standalone Dolphin Junction story collection. Essential reading for fans of spy fiction, literary thrillers, and darkly comic British writing at its very best.