Mick Herron

When a retired spy is found dead on an Oxford coach, Slough House is ordered to stay out of the investigation. Jackson Lamb ignores this instruction entirely, suspecting the man's death connects to an old Cold War operation that was never properly closed.

The death of a former Slough House officer's child pulls the team into an operation in Oxford, where old enemies are surfacing and the landscape of British intelligence is quietly being dismantled by people who see it as a procurement opportunity.

When a young man is kidnapped and threatened with beheading on live television, the disgraced spies of Slough House — MI5's dumping ground for agents who have blundered their way out of the Service's good graces — find themselves unexpectedly at the centre of a crisis no one saw coming.

A populist politician is using terrorism for political gain. Slough House is pulled into the middle of a crisis that combines the worst instincts of Westminster with the worst capabilities of the intelligence world — and the rules, as always, are being made by whoever has the most to hide.

When one of the slow horses is kidnapped, Slough House is suddenly, involuntarily useful to Diana Taverner and Regent's Park. But the price of their cooperation may be higher than anyone at Slough House anticipated.

River Cartwright's legendary grandfather David — the Old Bastard, founder of a generation of British intelligence — appears to be losing his mind. But the intelligence world doesn't really lose its old warriors: it uses them up, and someone is using David Cartwright very deliberately.

A government inquiry into past intelligence operations unearths secrets from the Berlin Wall era. Two young civil servants conducting the inquiry find themselves trapped in a room with testimony that someone powerful wants to remain buried.

Diana Taverner's position as First Desk is under threat, someone is running a hostile influence operation through Westminster, and the slow horses of Slough House are, as usual, in the middle of something they were never meant to touch.