#20BooksofSummer2025 – Nos 7-8, Herron & Osman

Nine books now read, time for reviews of numbers 7 & 8, which just begged to be paired together, as both involve crime / spies, but both later volumes in series, where I don’t want to say too much – so shorter write-ups are game here.

Slough House by Mick Herron, (Slow Horses #7)

First off, I’m delighted to hear that Herron was recently awarded the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Luckily I’ve still got volume 8, some Slow Horses novellas and the adjacent The Secret Hours to read, plus a couple of his standalones, plus some of the Zöe Boehm series to read too. The latter reminds me that the first Boehm novel, Down Cemetery Road, filmed in Oxford and starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson will be airing this autumn on Apple TV and I’d like to read it before watching. Slow Horses series 5 is coming too in September.

But back to Slough House. After a scene-setting prologue in which a woman is stabbed by a woman pretending to protect her from a stalker and including a neat nod to Fleming’s SMERSH, Herron begins, as always, with doors, inviting us to enter Slough House with him. Gradually the team gather for the day’s work. Turns out that the murdered woman was a former occupant of Slough House, and she’s the first. Is someone picking off the Slow Horses one by one…

The awful Peter Judd is first chair of the secret service and has been doing deals with third parties including the ghastly Damien Cantor, a populist broadcasting mogul, to get fundng for projects. Diana Taverner is put in a difficult position, but we know she’ll fight her corner. However, a revenge tit for tat murder for the Russians managing to kill a British citizen with Novichok, looks as if it may turn on them. Judd has leverage on Taverner now, whereas before she was manipulating him.

Brilliantly plotted, making reference to recent events, and full of sardonic humour as always, this time Herron leaves us on a total knife edge and I’m staying schtum, save to say I’ll be reading Bad Actors sooner rather than later to find out what happened. So here are a few bons mots that I marked to make you chuckle…

She had a long-standing aversion to being told what she knew, though it had been a long while since anyone had dared. And this particular man – Damien Cantor – had probably been in school then. He was mid-thirties now, treading the line between being a noise in the business world and still hip to the three-day stubble and trainers. When they went on about sixty being the new forty, they forgot to add that that made thirty-something the new twelve.

‘All righty,’ said Lamb. ‘I’ve had as much as I can stand for one lifetime. Piss off and do some work. And remember, all of us are lying in the gutter. But some of you are circling the drain.’ (love this riff on Wilde – Ed)

‘To be fair,’ said Lamb ‘thinking of you lot as spooks requires a mental leap. Like calling Farage a statesman.’

‘My first thought was, there must be a takeawy round here somewhere. But I suppose, once they’ve snuck out and got me some food, they can go round up the missing.’ […]
‘Sneaked by the way,’ she said.
‘What now?’
‘It’s “sneaked”. Snuck’s not proper English.’
‘Do I look like I give a feaked?’ said Lamb.

Source: Own copy. John Murray hardback, 309 pages. BUY in paperback at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman – Thursday Murder Club #4

I finally got to the last volume of the original quartet of Thursday Murder Club novels – a fifth is due this autumn though! Events in this one do bring things to a sort of close, or hiatus, if you will. There are two main storylines to this one. Firstly, Kuldesh, Brighton antiques dealer and an old friend of Elizabeth’s husband Stephen is murdered, and a package (which probably contained drugs) that he’d been forced to ‘look after’ has gone missing. And secondly there is Stephen’s accelerating decline – his dementia will soon overcome him, and Elizabeth needs to make the most of her time with him.

With Elizabeth increasingly absent, this means that Joyce steps up as de facto leader of the group and shows us that she is no sheep, but has flashes of brilliance that Elizabeth would be proud of too; some of the chapters are in the first person from her diary. As the team investigate Kuldesh’s murder in their own special way aided, as always, by Chris and Donna of the local constabulary, Donna’s mum Patrice who is Chris’ partner, and Polish builder Bogdan who is now in a relationship with Donna. Apart from the various arms of a massive drug smuggling operation, they’ll encounter a wily art forger and her bearish Canadian husband. A neat little subdidiary plot takes in online fraud, with a new addition to Cooper’s Chase, Mervyn, whom Joyce is rather taken with, is besotted with Tatiana in Lithuania, to whom he’s been sending money.

Maybe with the overshadowing themes of a friends’ death, and thenw2 a friend and husband’s impending death, this one is slightly less funny than the previous three, although Joyce’s diaries are always hilarious. But Osman has succeeded in making us care about his foursome and their friends and that is really something. Here’s to their fifth adventure. By the way, Osman also won a CWA dagger this year – The Dagger in the Library nominated by libraries and borrowers.

Source: Own copy. Viking hardback 2023, 422 pages. BUY in paperback at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.