Dead Lions (Slough House Series #2)

by Mick Herron

Overview

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. 

The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts. 

But the head of Slough House, the 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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616953676
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/08/2014
Series:	Slough House Series , #2
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	6,052
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

A fuse had blown in Swindon, so the south-west network ground to a halt. In Paddington the monitors wiped departure times, flagging everything ‘Delayed’, and stalled trains clogged the platforms; on the concourse luckless travellers clustered round suitcases, while seasoned commuters repaired to the pub, or rang home with cast-iron alibis before hooking up with their lovers back in the city. And thirty-six minutes outside London, a Worcester-bound HST crawled to a halt on a bare stretch of track with a view of the Thames. Lights from houseboats pooled on the river’s surface, illuminating a pair of canoes which whipped out of sight even as Dickie Bow registered them: two frail crafts built for speed, furrowing the water on a chilly March evening.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Dead Lions"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Mick Herron.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for DEAD LIONS

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel
A BBC Front Row Best Crime Novel of the Year
A Times Best Crime and Thriller Book of the Year
Winner of the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize
A Sunday Times Top 50 Crime and Thriller Book of the Past 5 Years
A 2014 Barry Award Nominee
A 2014 Macavity Award Nominee

“Smart, sharp British wit at its finest. A uniquely brilliant take on the British spy novel.”
─Cara Black, New York Times bestselling author of Murder Below Montparnasse

“Funny, clever . . . Genuinely thrilling. The novel is equally noteworthy for its often lyrical prose.”
─Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“A great romp.”
─Jeff Park, BBC Front Row

“Delightful . . . with a dry humor reminiscent of Greene and Waugh.”
—Sunday Times, Best Thrillers and Crime Novels of the Past 5 Years

“Clever and funny.”
─The Times

“Herron delivers unbeatable entertainment for thriller fans.”
─Library Journal, Starred Review

“[A] wickedly clever send-up of the classic British spy novel.”
─Crime Writers' Association

“If you like your suspense novels told with a smart dash of wit and sarcasm, filled with lots of twists and turns, Herron's your man.”
─Shelf Awareness

“[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

"Herron provides a dour, twisty spy thriller with something for everyone: part post–Cold War miasma, part James Bond heroics, and elliptical withal."
─Kirkus Reviews

“Dead Lions is at once a finely wrought thriller and a farcical, fiercely pointed tale of political greed and bureaucratic corruption. Mick Herron writes like a dream.”
─Open Letters Monthly

“A surreal, cynical, yet amusing look at the world of British intelligence . . . a looking-glass world that features KGB undercover agents, a Russian oligarch, a text message on a mobile phone and the ghost of a fabled Soviet spymaster who may not be real . . . an amusing, serpentine plot that takes readers as far from the glamorous world of Ian Fleming’s tuxedo-wearing spy as could be imagined.”
─January Magazine, Best Books of 2013

“Full of style and cynical humor . . . Has all the punch-your-lights-out action of a movie thriller.”
─Read Me Deadly

Praise for Mick Herron

“[Herron's] cleverly plotted page-turners are driven by dialogue that bristles with one-liners. Much of the humor comes from Herron’s sharp eye for the way bureaucracies, whether corporate or clandestine, function and malfunction. The world of Slough House is closer to “The Office” than to 007.”
—The Associated Press

“The sharpest spy fiction since John le Carré.”
—NPR's Fresh Air

“Mick Herron never tells a suspense story in the expected way . . . In Herron's book, there is no hiding under the desk.”
─The New York Times Book Review
 
“Stylish and engaging.”
─The Washington Post
 
"The best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest."
–Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

“[A] masterful thriller . . . The intricate plot, coupled with Herron's breezy writing style, results in superior entertainment that makes most other novels of suspense appear dull and slow-witted by comparison.”
─Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
 
“Like a good movie . . . grabs the reader from the first page.”
─Booklist, Starred Review

From the Publisher

In the opening chapter of Herron’s funny, clever sequel to 2010’s Slow Horses (2010), low-level British spy, Dickie Bow, dies on a bus to Oxford of apparently natural causes. To Jackson Lamb, the thoroughly unlikable head of Slough House (“the spooks’ equivalent of Devil’s Island,” to which disgraced or out-of-favor British spies are exiled), Bow’s death plus a cryptic, unsent text keyed into his cellphone (the single word “cicadas”) suggest Russian intrigue, perhaps tied to a long-dormant, possibly mythical, spy named Alexander Popov. Meanwhile, two Slough House operatives are seconded to the job of protecting a Russian billionaire, Arkady Pashkin, in London for a nebulous meeting. The complex plot drags a bit in the middle, as Herron gets quite a number of balls in the air, but once he does, the narrative picks up real steam and becomes genuinely thrilling. The novel is equally noteworthy for its often lyrical prose. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.) (May)

Publishers Weekly

Herron's protagonists live in London's Slough House, home to disgraced M15 agents; readers might have met them already in Herron's Slow Horses. Spotting a conundrum that reaches deep into the Cold War, these eccentric spies have a chance at redemption as they employ their quirks to unravel a twisted pair of plots, one cooked up by a Soviet spy out to avenge a historic atrocity by wreaking havoc, the other a fiendish plot to heist treasure from London's Needle building. The crew also battles the stifling MI5 bureaucracy, which gives Herron untethered leave to skewer the world of spydom with wicked humor and telling details. VERDICT Herron brings a fresh and puckish eye to espionage and crime, leaving behind the stodgy staples. With zippy chapters moving among plot turns, superb drawing of oddball characters, tantalizing suspense, and smart-arse dialog, Herron delivers unbeatable entertainment for thriller fans.—Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Library Journal

A second anti-terrorist workout for the sorely tried denizens of Finsbury's Slough House (Slow Horses, 2010). Successful retirees from MI5 are quietly pensioned off with the tacit thanks of a grateful nation. The less successful ones--the ones who've shown themselves unfit because of unsafe personal habits or screw-ups that don't rise to the level of criminal malfeasance--are packed off to Slough House, a dead-end office from which it's hoped they'll take themselves away by resigning from the service once they realize they're never going to do anything important again. But now the embers of Slough House are stirred by the death of one of its own. Dickie Bow, formerly a street rat in Berlin who's been following legendary Russian agent Alexander Popov, evidently learned enough for one final text message--"cicadas"--before he died, apparently of a heart attack, on a London bus. Jackson Lamb, the perennially annoyed leader of the Slough House brigade, decides that both Dickie's death and the cicadas warrant closer examination. Two other Slough House colleagues, Min Harper and his lover, Louise Guy, have meanwhile been seconded as minders for the upcoming visit of oil oligarch Arkady Pashkin. Despite the fact that the Limitations Committee resolutely refuses to acknowledge the dead lions of Slough House, it disburses enough funding to send River Cartwright undercover to the village of Upshott, where he learns some truly alarming things about the cicadas just in time for the explosive climax of Pashkin's visit. Herron (Down Cemetery Road, 2009, etc.) provides a dour, twisty spy thriller with something for everyone: part post–Cold War miasma, part James Bond heroics, and elliptical withal.

Kirkus Reviews