Goddess of the Ice Realm (Lord of the Isles #5) 3.5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Goddess of the Ice Realm
Series: Lord of the Isles #5
Author: David Drake
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Pages: 533
Words: 190K
Publish: 2003

I read this Book in 2006, twenty years ago. It doesn’t feel that long at all. Crap. I guess I have to acknowledge that I’ve fully entered into the next stage of my life. Or I can keep denying it and be “amazed and astounded” every time it is rubbed into my face. I’ll let you guess which is the more likely outcome ;-)

I enjoyed the story but I have to admit, having an “alternate” Ilna (one of the main characters) being the villainous goddess set on multiverse domination wasn’t leaned into nearly as hard as it could be. It was interesting to see how the demon tree was involved but there wasn’t enough detail given to make it feel like a real alternate Ilna. And the real Ilna disposing of her goddess level alternate? It felt almost accidental. I mean, our Ilna cracks the ice beneath goddess Ilna’s throne and the goddess falls into the water and is devoured by hungry creatures. That is it. It felt like Drake had a very good idea and then puffed it out to about 500 pages and then decided enough was enough and just killed the badguys as needed. But to be honest, I think that’s been how things have gone in every book so far and I’m just now really noticing it.

The artist Donato has done previous Lord of the Isles covers and I showcased a slightly more full picture for Queen of Demons. For this book, I tracked down the original drawing and I’d like to showcase it here. It is a portrayal of the royal guards and army pushing into the Ice Realm and using long spears, etc to fend off giant magical creatures long enough for those with axes to get in close and do the dirty work. Donato has captured that spirit of the soldier fighting against something unspeakable, by not showing the horrors but showing the soldiers faces. I was pretty impressed.

I think the guy in the silver cuirass is supposed to be Prince Garric and the man to the left, with the very prominent ear-ring, is supposed to be Chalcus. I’m not sure if there are other named characters surrounding Garric or not. It’s a busy scene depicting a very busy part of the story, so I’m happy to just recognize two of the main characters :-D

★★★✬☆

From Grokipedia

Goddess of the Ice Realm opens with Garric and his retinue arriving at the island city of Carcosa as part of his ongoing campaign to reunite the island kingdoms into a single empire, where the wizard Tenoctris immediately perceives a powerful supernatural assault directed against them. Concurrently, Ilna and her beloved Chalcus are dispatched to investigate a magical threat disrupting shipping in the northern regions. Soon afterward, Cashel is translated to another world through evil magic, while Sharina is sent to yet a separate world, separating the main protagonists amid the heightened cosmic forces that empower even minor wizards during this thousand-year magical peak. In their respective realms, the separated characters confront deadly dangers and challenges: Cashel finds himself in an alien world where he must protect native inhabitants from a powerful inter-dimensional threat, while Sharina navigates a world involving wizards pursuing magical artifacts, and Ilna and Chalcus encounter the titular goddess more directly in the north. Garric contends with the supernatural assault and related threats in Carcosa, with the goddess exerting a potent, sinister influence throughout the narrative even when not physically present. Each overcomes their individual perils through courage, skill, and resourcefulness before the storylines converge. The protagonists reunite in a terrifying and dramatic climax centered on the goddess, resulting in a grand and compelling resolution that propels forward the overarching quest to reunify the Isles despite the intensified magical energies and human evils they amplify. This installment maintains the series pattern of separation and reunion while escalating the stakes through these parallel adventures and the direct confrontation with the title entity.

Characters

The central protagonists of Goddess of the Ice Realm are the young brother-sister pairs Garric or-Reise and Sharina os-Reise, along with Cashel or-Kenset and Ilna os-Kenset, who continue their roles as key figures navigating supernatural threats in the Isles. Garric or-Reise exercises leadership over his retinue and stands central to events in the island city of Carcosa, where he confronts mounting dangers alongside his companions. The wizard Tenoctris, serving in an advisory capacity, detects a powerful supernatural assault directed against the group upon their arrival in Carcosa.Sharina os-Reise experiences displacement to another world through magical means, encountering personal dangers that test her resilience and contribute to her development amid unfamiliar perils. Cashel or-Kenset is likewise translated to a separate world by evil magic, where he draws upon his physical strength and combat prowess to meet substantial challenges. Ilna os-Kenset, characterized by her strong-willed determination, undertakes an investigation into a magical threat disrupting northern shipping, joined by her beloved partner Chalcus. Chalcus, an action-oriented companion skilled in seafaring and combat, forms a close partnership with Ilna during this mission. These narratives underscore supporting dynamics such as the sibling bonds between Garric and Sharina as well as Cashel and Ilna, complemented by the romantic relationship between Ilna and Chalcus.

"Scrye'ing" Old Memories

 

This picture from Scryenotes.wordpress.com

If you have followed me for a couple of weeks, you'll have noticed that each Monday I post a picture of a Magic the Gathering card and usually some of my thoughts on it. Today there is the internet which will tell you all you need to know about the various cards, from price to all the info about it. However back in the 90's the internet was just getting off the ground and we still relied on magazines to give us previews of upcoming cards, sets and any price changes.

I used the magazine Scrye as my fount of knowledge. It came out a couple of times a year and it was usually a pretty thick publication. It had to be, since it was a big old price guide. If you look at the cover featuring the Star Wars cards, you can see the blurb in the upper left corner "Complete Price List for Mirage", which was the latest MtG set. Scrye also covered a multitude of other CCG's (collectable card games), as you can see from the cover. There was Star Wars, X-Files, Middle Earth, Legends of the Five Rings, Star Trek, Netrunner, DC comics and other various card games that came and then usually went. It was the Wild West time of the CCG's.

While the price list part of the magazine was the biggest draw for me (it did take up about 3/4's of the magazine), the articles were a good read too, especially if you weren't into a particular other card game. You could learn about the game, see some of the cards and in most issues, get some promo cards. They were all mass produced junk, but it still gave you an idea of what the game was like and how it differed from Magic.

I think I only ever bought two, maybe three of these magazines. They were expensive (compared to a comic book that cost you $1.25) and only came out every couple of months. I know I bought the one in the featured image (the greenman impression) and I'm pretty sure I also bought this Star Wars one. So I bought two in a row and realized Magic prices didn't change THAT much in a couple of months and the articles didn't really apply to the type of Magic me and my friends played, ie, casual kitchen table Magic while the articles were more about Competitive Magic. I didn't want to dominate my gaming circle, I just wanted to have fun. And when all you focus on is winning, the fun goes right out the door.

I do remember though seeing one of my cards having gone up 5 or 10 cents and that I had like 10 of them. I was elated! I had just made a whole dollar without doing anything. Man, the sky was the limit at that point, hahahahahaa. I hadn't yet realized that those prices were what the cards were selling for in a store, not what "I" could sell them for. But what it did do was help me and my friends when we were trading. It was not a 1 for 1 trade. The prices took into account how good the cards were and since we didn't really understand that, it helped us to keep parity.

That is about all I have to write here. Enjoy your weekend :-)

Doctor No (James Bond #6) 3.5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Doctor No
Series: James Bond #6
Author: Ian Fleming
Rating: 3,5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 205
Words: 79K
Publish: 1958

This was the best Bond story that I’ve read so far. Bond goes on an easy assignment to recover from his time during “From Russia with Love” and ends up fighting against a megalomaniac who is paying to grow his little personal empire with bird guano.

Things actually move along at a decent clip here. Bond does things instead of just sitting around on a flipping train considering the future morosely. A couple of British agents are kidnapped and killed. Bond and an old friend kayak to a forbidden island. Dr No’s minions shoot up the beach where the kayak is stored with big ol’ machine guns and then use a modified dune buggy with a flame thrower and guns to track Bond and his most recent female acquaintance and capture them. Bond is put through a torture obstacle course and ends up fighting a giant squid, and pokes its eye out with a homemade spear (atta boy Bond!) and then he buries Dr No in tons of dried guano. That’s almost more action that what was in the previous 5 books combined! Also, beyond a light seasoning of Communists helping Doctor No with his missile control program, there is no cold war antics. Thank goodness for that!

My only issue is that Dr No’s master plan about either holding American cities hostage by controlling American missiles or just outright destroying them, didn’t seem to actually take into account Russia. If Dr No had done that, he still wouldn’t be able to take over a large chunk of real estate and become an absolute Dictator. The Russkies would have moved in and swept him aside. For someone so smart, it seemed like a glaring oversight. But that’s a pretty small quibble considering he died by asphyxiating in bird poop, hahahahaa.

I like the cover that Devilreads had for this ebook version (as seen in the featured image) but I couldn’t find a high quality version of it, so I looked around and found the first edition for the hardcover. It’s a good quality cover that hadn’t bought into the movie franchise just yet, so it is distinctly its own thing. I approve of books staying their own thing and not whoring themselves out to the movie versions.

★★★✬☆

From Wikipedia

After recovering from serious poisoning inflicted by the SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb (in From Russia, with Love) the Secret Service agent James Bond is sent by his superior, M, on an undemanding mission to the British colony of Jamaica. He is instructed to investigate the disappearance of Commander John Strangways, the head of MI6's Station J in Kingston, and his secretary. Bond is briefed that Strangways had been investigating the activities of Doctor Julius No, a reclusive Chinese-German who lives on the fictional island of Crab Key and runs a guano mine. The island has a colony of roseate spoonbills at one end while local rumour is that a vicious dragon also lives there. The spoonbills are protected by the American National Audubon Society, two of whose representatives died when their plane crashed on No's airstrip.

On his arrival in Jamaica, Bond soon realises that he is being watched. His hotel room is searched, a basket of poisoned fruit is delivered to the room—supposedly a gift from the colonial governor—and a deadly centipede is placed in his bed while he is sleeping. With the help of an old friend, Quarrel, Bond surreptitiously visits Crab Key to establish whether there is a connection between No and the disappearance of the MI6 personnel. Bond and Quarrel meet Honeychile Rider, who is there to collect valuable shells. Bond and Rider are captured by No's men after Quarrel is burned to death by the doctor's "dragon"—a flamethrowing, armoured swamp buggy designed to keep away trespassers. Bond and Rider are taken to a luxurious facility carved into the mountain.

No tells Bond that he is working with the Russians and has built an elaborate underground facility from which he can sabotage US test missiles launched from Cape Canaveral. He had previously been a member of a Chinese tong, but after he stole a large sum of money from their treasury, he was captured by the organisation. The tong's leaders had No's hands cut off as a warning to others, and then shot him. Because No's heart was on the right side of his body, the bullet missed it and he survived.

Interested in the ability of the human body to withstand and survive pain, No forces Bond to navigate his way through an obstacle course constructed in the facility's ventilation system. Bond is kept under observation as he suffers electric shocks, burns and an encounter with large, venomous spiders. Bond's ordeal ends in a fight with a captive giant squid, which he defeats by using improvised weapons. After his escape he encounters Rider, who had been pegged out to be eaten by crabs; they had ignored her and she managed to escape.

Bond kills No by taking over the guano-loading machine at the docks and diverting the flow of guano to bury him alive. Bond and Rider then escape from No's complex in the "dragon" buggy, sail back to Jamaica and notify the colonial authorities.

September '26 Circum et Pervagatus

 

Raw Data:

Novels/Novellas - 9 ↓

Short Stories - 2 ↑

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 -

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.63 ↑↑

Pages - 2897 ↓

Words - 874K ↓

The Bad:

Groo 55 - 2stars. The first time Groo has let me down. I was devastated.

The Good:

The Possessed - 5Stars!

I, Asimov - ALSO 5STARS!!!!

Movie:

Monsters Inc was a fun movie, but definitely for the kids. Glad I rewatched it on dvd so I won't waste any money upgrading to bluray. I don't plan on ever watching it again.

Miscellaneous Posts:

• [Art] Day & Night, Sun & Moon
• Merfolk of the Pearl Trident - MTG 4E
• Imperatoris Chronicorum VII
• Mesa Pegasus - MTG 4E
• Millstone - MTG 4E
• [Art] Maiden of the Fall 2026
• My TBR Lists - The Deep Dive
• Mind Bomb - MTG 4E

Personal:

First off, can we just stop for a moment and appreciate that I read TWO 5star books, in one month? That is practically hitting the book lottery. and that bumped my monthly average up to 3.63. Talk about moving in the rarified circles of Bookdom!

September was yet another discombobulating month. Work was topsy turvy, what with my coworker being out for 2 weeks due to his wife having their first kid. Throw in a new crew chief getting trained for our Northern office and everyone wondering when SlowBoy2.0 was going to get the axe and well, we came in each day not knowing what the day held. It must have been hellacious on the office manager as he had to schedule all that chaos!

Mrs B and I celebrated 18 years of marriage and ate like there was no tomorrow! We have had our various ups and downs during those 18 years, but I wouldn't trade a day of them if it meant it was with someone else.

Of course, 2 weeks later we both were sick, with different things. I had some sort of seasonal allergies and exhaustion going on while Mrs B ran a temperature and was throwing up. That made for a thoroughly miserable couple of days. But we got through it and that was that.

Some summers September is very summerlike. This time around, it was leaning into the whole Autumn thing. It was much cooler than expected, it rained a bit more, the leaves started changing colors and the ragwort was pollinating all over the place (hence my seasonal allergies this year). I would like Autumn a lot more if Spring came after it ;-)

Cover Love:

Those Without Mercy definitely takes the cake when it comes to cover love this month. Grim and creepy!

Plans for Next Month:

October is the Pumpkin Festival. I plan to have a post on that the second Saturday of the month.

Now that we are approaching the end of the year, it is time I begin catching up on my book reviews, so expect Wednesdays to be filled again. In fact, I suspect that my calendar will be full up to make sure I am all caught up by year's end. That means you can expect more book reviews each month. Aren't you so lucky!

Dead Cert (Standalone) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Dead Cert
Series: Standalone
Author: Dick Francis
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 218
Words: 86K
Publish: 1962

First off, that has got to be one of the world’s ugliest, most uncreative covers ever. I don’t like it and the publishers should be totally ashamed of themselves. In fact, if the publishers were standing right in front of me now, I’d punch them in their ugly face and tell them that cover hurts me more than me mashing their schnozzes did them. #metoo

I saw Dick Francis books all through my growing up years. He was at the library. He was at K-Mart. He was at Barnes & Noble. He was at the airport. He was everywhere. Most of the time the covers just had his name in HUGE letters and then a small title and no picture. I was not interested in a book styled that way (of course, what I’m showcasing here is even worse, so be careful what you wish for, right?). Fast forward 30+ years to today when I was on the hunt for new to me old books. I think somebody recommended Dick Francis to me as an author in one of my “Book Recommendations” posts. So I knew the name, I just didn’t know anything about him or the stories he wrote. My interested was piqued when I found out that most of his stuff was standalone stories. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind multi-volume stories or even series that are self-contained stories, but there is a part of me that just wants to read ONE book and have that be it. Francis filled that niche. It has taken me almost 18months to start, but given my TBR Reading List, is actually quite a reasonable time frame. I also knew that horses and equestrian racing formed the nucleus of the stories, so I prepared myself for all sorts of horsey things.

This was an enjoyable murder mystery that at times left me scratching my head as to why the main character was doing what he was doing instead of going to the police. Then I realized it was 1962 and things were a little different in Merry Old England than they are today. Seriously though, that was the part of the story that made this 3stars and not any higher. It also brought out just how much the speed of communication changes things. Walking somewhere to get to a telephone. Leaving messages. Crime was slower because life itself was slower because it was going as fast as it could but it just wasn’t as fast as today. Now that I’ve gotten this first book under my belt I expect to be a little better prepared for next time. I’m not sure that if the main character in the next book tries to be super detective man that that will go over any better than it did here though. Our guy has to play detective because the police aren’t doing anything, but man, it just didn’t ring true. Even with the “Oh, it’s 1962”. It’s probably as realistic though as those filthy casual cozy murder mysteries where some bleeping blonde bimbo baker solves a mystery with her friends instead of actually running her bakery.

I learned about steeple chasing (the specific kind of horse racing featured here in the story) and am now an expert. Ask me anything about it and I’ll give you the answer. It probably won’t be the correct answer, but that’s on you for asking some random guy on the internet questions about horse racing.

While I enjoyed this book overall, it did feel like the kind of popcorn summer book that people who only read a book a year would read. What I am hoping for is that each book will be different enough to set it apart from its predecessors.

★★★☆☆

From Wikipedia

Admiral should have won his race at Maidenhead, but an unexpected fall and the accidental death of top jockey Bill Davidson gave his friend, Alan York, the win instead. But Alan recognised a trip wire when he saw one and was not about to let a murderous act go unpunished. The trouble was that he left drawing it to the attention of the authorities too late and the evidence had disappeared. Only the efficient Police Inspector Lodge is prepared to believe that it was a deliberate killing - and at first is inclined to suspect Alan's involvement.

Alan is persuaded to ride a novice hunter in another race and is surprised to find it belongs to the glamorous Kate Ellery-Penn, whose Uncle George has given her the horse as a birthday present. Alan is attracted to her from the start, but unfortunately so is another of his jockey friends, Dane.

As he leaves the course, Alan comes across two gangs of taxi drivers, from London and Brighton, brutally fighting it out with knives and knuckle-dusters. Not long afterwards he recognises some of them when he is roughed up as a warning not to pursue his enquiries, but this only spurs him on to investigate what is obviously an organised attempt to interfere with horse racing on a wider scale than he had first thought. Some of his jockey colleagues have already come under suspicion for deliberately slowing down their mounts: the popular and experienced Sandy Mason, for example, and the cocky but easily panicked youngster, Joe Nantwich.

From now on Alan sets out on a double pursuit, of the gang responsible for the death of his friend, and of Kate. The latter lives in a stately house in Sussex with her upper-crust Uncle and her Aunt Deb, who does her best to discourage Alan from taking his interest in Kate further when he pays a weekend stay. While there he visits Brighton with Kate and comes across an ex-military pub landlord who has organised his fellow owners of small businesses in resisting a protection racket. Taxi drivers from one of the local firms were involved with this and Alan traces some of those he recognises from his earlier run-in with them to Marconicars.

Before he can take things much further, Alan's own horse is tripped during a race. As he lies on the ground helpless, one of those who had helped rig the wire comes over and kicks him unconscious. When he comes round in hospital, he is concussed and there are gaps in his memory. Back at Bill Davidson's house, where he continues to live for the time being, he discovers that one of Bill's young sons routinely listens to incoming phone calls. From him he learns that Bill had received a phone instruction to pull the race in which he died. Having had such a call too, Alan had forewarned Inspector Lodge of what might happen and is visited by him as he recovers. Suspicion seems to point to a bookmaker who has an office above Marconicars and to one of their principal customers.

Joe Nantwich has discovered a clue to who might be rigging the races but before he can hand it over to Alan, he is stabbed to death at the West Sussex races. Next the killers come after Alan, posing as police officers, but he manages to escape them on Admiral (which he has inherited from Bill) and jumps over the wayside hedges into the fields and then a fir plantation, with the fake officers and the Marconicars fleet combing all the nearby roads.

Overcoming one of their drivers, Alan heads for the main office and finds Uncle George at the radio microphone, furiously insisting that Alan be killed. Rather than be arrested, Uncle George shoots himself and consequently Kate rejects Alan, only relenting later and agreeing to marry him. When Alan's memory returns fully, he realises it was Sandy Mason who had been passing on information about his enquiries to the gang and had kicked him after his fall. With Dane's magnanimous help, Alan gets his revenge by unseating Sandy from his horse mid-race.

Mind Bomb - MTG 4E

 

Who says artists don't have a sense of humor? I mean, a literal mind bomb here? That just makes me laugh, while it also grosses me out completely.

London Rules (Slough House #5) 4Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

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.