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Title:
London Rules
Series: Slough House #5
Author:
Mick Herron
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre:
Thriller
Pages: 264
Words:
101K
Publish: 2018
None
of the crew die in this story. I kept waiting for someone to die, the
last person I’d expect. So when someone didn’t die, I’d think
to myself, ok, who don’t I expect next? And then someone else
wouldn’t die. Right until the end of the book. I was simultaneously
happy and disappointed :-D
There was also a chapter where Jackson Lamb was just on a roll with his his un-pc remarks and I was in stitches for paragraph after paragraph. I think I was laughing for a solid 30minutes. The one instance that really made me laugh was when Jackson Lamb mansplains “mansplaining” to one of the female characters. I just about died, hahahahahahaa.
The story itself was a bit confusing and I still don’t understand WHY North Korea running a non-secret UK Government sanctioned op would cause “embarrassment”. Honestly, when I was done I felt exactly how I did when I finished up From Russia with Love, the last James Bond novel I read. There are bits of spycraft in James Bond and here in Slough House that I simply do not understand. The whole “appearance” thing has to be pretty blunt (as it is in most instances here in Slough House) for it to make sense to me. That’s not a brag, more admitting a weakness.
So I had a rollicking good time and would continue to recommend this series to anyone wanting some modern day spycraft story without the more typical kabooms and super action heroes.
I did reach out to Dictator Xi Jinping to see if he had read this book, but sadly, his schedule was full of goat humping, so he hadn’t gotten around to it. So you’ll have to survive without his thoughts on it.
★★★★☆
From Supersummary.com
The
fifth novel in the Slough House series is set against post-Brexit
political turmoil in Britain. Slough House is a decrepit London
office building where MI5 (Britain's domestic intelligence agency)
dumps agents who have disgraced themselves or botched assignments.
These agents, known as "slow horses," are given pointless
busywork designed to bore them into quitting. Their boss, Jackson
Lamb, is a slovenly, foul-mouthed contrarian who delights in
tormenting his staff while covertly protecting them from the
Service's main headquarters at Regent's Park.
The novel
opens with five armed men massacring the residents of Abbotsfield, a
small village in the Derbyshire hills, killing twelve people in a
two-minute assault. The attack is claimed by the so-called Islamic
State and plunges the country into crisis. At Regent's Park, First
Desk (head of MI5) Claude Whelan faces pressure from the Prime
Minister, who is politically besieged by Dennis Gimball, a
Brexit-championing MP planning to rejoin the governing party and
challenge for the leadership.
At Slough House, the slow
horses endure their dreary routines. Catherine Standish, Lamb's
office manager and a recovering alcoholic, handles the department's
accounts. Roderick Ho, a talented but socially oblivious computer
specialist, spends his lunch hour playing Pokémon GO. Shirley
Dander, a combative agent sixty-two days drug-free after finishing
anger management classes, carries a wrap of cocaine she plans to use
as a reward; she still grieves for her late colleague Marcus. Louisa
Guy compiles lists of library users who have borrowed
terrorism-related books. J.K. Coe, a former Psychological Evaluation
specialist who once shot a handcuffed prisoner, writes fake breakup
letters to protect deep-cover agents. River Cartwright visits his
grandfather David Cartwright, a retired senior intelligence officer
in a care home with advancing dementia.
The plot
accelerates when Shirley witnesses a silver Honda deliberately mount
the pavement, heading straight for Ho. She tackles him out of the
way, but Ho, engrossed in his phone, does not notice. Lamb privately
believes Shirley but refuses to notify Regent's Park, invoking
"London Rules, rule one," one of his informal survival
maxims for MI5 operatives: Cover your arse. Reporting the threat
would invite scrutiny from Diana Taverner, the Park's ambitious
Second Desk (head of Operations), who might use the opportunity to
dismantle Slough House. That night, Lamb stakes out Ho's house while
Shirley, Louisa, and River independently trail Ho to a nightclub.
There, his girlfriend Kim sends him home alone, then calls someone to
confirm he is home, adding, "Make it quick? He's harmless."
An intruder enters Ho's house in the small hours, but Lamb, waiting
inside, attacks the man. A silver car fires at Shirley outside. The
car is later found burnt out, its bullets matching weapons used at
Abbotsfield.
Two more attacks follow: A pipe bomb
detonates in a penguin enclosure called "The Watering Hole"
at a zoo near Chester, and a bomb is found and disabled on a train
into Paddington station. Taverner orders a lockdown of Slough House
and sends Emma Flyte, head of MI5's internal police (the Dogs), to
guard the slow horses. During lockdown, Coe identifies a critical
pattern: The attacks follow stages from an old British Intelligence
document designed as a template for destabilizing a developing
nation. "Destroy the village, poison the watering hole, cripple
the railway" match the attacks precisely. The document was
digitized onto the Service database, where Ho could have accessed it.
The devastating implication is that when the perpetrators reveal they
followed a British-authored blueprint, the scandal will be
catastrophic. The remaining stages are to assassinate a populist
leader and seize control of the media.
The slow horses
suspect Ho was honeytrapped into stealing the document by Kim, who
drugged Ho and convinced him he had already revealed secrets, making
him willing to steal it from the Service database. Lamb pulls a gun
on Flyte, has Shirley handcuff her, and dispatches his agents: River
and Coe to Slough, where Gimball is holding a constituency meeting,
and Louisa and Shirley to Birmingham, where Zafar Jaffrey, a Muslim
politician favored to become Mayor of the West Midlands, is speaking
at a library.
Whelan blackmails Gimball into cancelling
his speech using compromising photographs. Gimball capitulates but
later steps outside, where Tyson Bowman, Jaffrey's aide, confronts
him. River intervenes and fights Bowman. Coe, positioned on
scaffolding above, accidentally kicks a heavy tin of paint that
strikes Gimball on the head and kills him. In Birmingham, when
Gimball's death breaks on social media, a suspicious van near the
library pulls away. The narrative reveals the attackers are North
Korean agents planted in the UK years earlier as students, operating
under the SSD (North Korea's State Security Department). They decide
the assassination stage is complete without their intervention.
The
slow horses capture Kim at Ho's house. Flyte interrogates her, and
Kim reveals the attackers are North Korean operatives. She mentions
that their leader Shin spoke of "the snake eating its own tail,"
suggesting the final attack will circle back to the beginning. The
group deduces that "seize the media" means staging an
assault at a heavily covered event, likely the Abbotsfield memorial
service at Westminster Abbey. The PM orders maximum security but
insists the service proceed. Taverner privately insists the attackers
must be killed to prevent them from revealing the British origins of
their plan.
Coe concludes the real target is the
simultaneous, smaller memorial at Abbotsfield village, a soft target
with media coverage but minimal security. He and Shirley drive to
Derbyshire; she takes Marcus's Glock from Lamb's desk. Inside the
attackers' van, An, one of the operatives, shoots the most fanatical
member, Danny, dead after Danny accuses Shin of betrayal. The
remaining three attackers assault Abbotsfield for a second time.
Their van strikes and kills a police officer. Chris, the driver, is
killed by police after exiting the van. Coe picks up a fallen
officer's rifle and shoots one gunman at close range. Shin enters the
church with a semi-automatic weapon. Shirley, who has locked the
front door to prevent a stampede, draws Marcus's Glock and walks down
the aisle toward him. He whispers that he deliberately missed during
the original massacre and surrenders. Shin is later reported dead at
the hospital, though the circumstances imply he was killed in
custody.
In the aftermath, Lamb meets Molly Doran, the
keeper of Regent's Park's physical archives who uses a wheelchair.
Doran traces the history of the stolen destabilization template,
called the Watering Hole Paper. It was declassified nineteen years
earlier by then-First Desk Charles Partner as part of "Operation
Shopping List," a sting operation conceived by a young Whelan to
catch a traitor in the Service by feeding him impressive-sounding
declassified documents as bait for foreign buyers. The operation was
aborted when the traitor died by suicide, but the document had
already been circulated to foreign parties, including the SSD.
Because it was officially declassified, Ho technically did not commit
treason. Lamb uses this leverage to deal with Taverner: In exchange
for the information to force Whelan out and claim the First Desk
position, she must leave Slough House untouched, return Ho, and keep
Doran in her post. Gimball's death is ruled an accident. Whelan
arrests Jaffrey after discovering that Jaffrey's younger brother
survived a drone strike in Syria and that Jaffrey used an underworld
fixer to obtain a false passport for him.
Before leaving
Slough House, Taverner tells Catherine that Lamb murdered Charles
Partner in his bathtub and that Partner's death was not a suicide.
Catherine receives this in silence. In the closing passages, Shirley
breaks her clean streak by snorting her cocaine, River receives a
mysterious phone call that cuts off after a single word, and
Catherine continues buying bottles of wine each evening. Dusk settles
over Slough House, Lamb departs alone into the night, and the
building waits in darkness.
