Title:

Dead Lions

Author:

Mick Herron

Category:

Mystery / Thriller

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

January 17, 2024

ead Lions is the second book in the Slough House series, which now is up to eight books, with more potentially coming. This series has been converted into a TV series on Apple Streaming, presumably with lucrative results for Herron, so he certainly is incentivized to write more volumes. The dialogue is pretty good, so if the characters lines are translated to the screenplay (I have not seen any of the TV series), the actors will have some clever lines to deliver. The MI5 agents that are banished to the Slough House prove to be insightful, and clever, even if their careers have been derailed by a fateful mistake somewhere in the past. (The premise of Slough House is that if an MI5 agent messes up, they don't get fired. Instead, they get reassigned to work in the Slough House, a dead end branch where nothing ever happens and the chance of getting promoted back to Regents Park is zero. Slough House is meant to be so stupefyingly dull that the disgraced agents will resign voluntarily.)

The man in charge at Slough House is the foul mouthed, chain-smoking, rude, belligerent Jackson Lamb. Lamb is also an experienced agent, who knows how to investigate a clue, relentlessly following a lead even if it seems to go nowhere. But Lamb is also keenly aware that the trail he is hunting might be a deliberate set of clues meant to guide him to a desired point; are the Russians deliberately constructing a false narrative for him to "uncover"? Lamb doesn't seem to mind his banishment to Slough House, perhaps being away from oversight suits his coarse personality.

Second in command at Slough House is Catherine Standish, a middle aged woman who is an ex-alcoholic. Standish is also an experienced agent, able to make some shrewd guesses as to what the Russians might be up to. Standish makes some keen observations, her remarks to Lamb reveal a lot of what these veteran spies are thinking.

Also working at Slough House is Roddy Ho, a computer networking genius who can hack into any system. It seems most modern thriller require a computer whiz with unworldly hacking abilities. I doubt Ho could truly be as effective as portrayed here - but maybe that is what the spy agencies want civilians like me to think!

River Cartwright - screwed up during a training mission in a public station during peak commuting hours, which resulted in his mistake getting wide attention. Even though River's grandfather was a former bigshot at MI5, familial connections were not enough to save his career. (If I remember correctly, the beginning of the first book in this series describes River's mistake.) River visits his grandfather sometimes, and hears stories about what happened "back in the day", when the Cold War raged. None of his grandfather's reminisces could have any bearing on the modern, post-USSR world, right?

Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander are latest agents who have been sentenced to Slough House. They are new to the drudgery and soul-crushing boredom that is Slough House. Lamb assigns them tasks without explaining what is behind his agenda.

The story begins with a low-level spook named Dickie Bow following a bald headed man that he recognizes from his days in Berlin. Bow is a nobody, he disappeared for a few days back in the Cold War, only to reappear claiming that the Russian mastermind Alexander Popov had kidnapped him. The only problem with that story is that it seems that Alexander Popov does not actually exist; Popov is a fictitous person the Russians invented to send the British agents off on red herrings. Now, years later, Bow recognizes a Russian in London... and Bow ends up dead. Even though Bow was a nobody, he was a former agent, and so Jackson Lamb investigates. At the scene of the crime, Lamb finds a cell phone buried in the seat of the bus where Bow perished. The cell phone has a one word, unsent, text message; it says: "cicadas".

A cicada is an insect that lives quietly underground for 17 years, and then erupts in a noisy frenzy. Did the hapless Dickie Bow stumble upon a sinister Russian plot that is about to erupt in dramatic fashion? Or is the cell phone actually a plant by the Russians intent on leading MI5 into a calculated trap?

There is a lot going on in this novel. A Russian oligarch, Arkady Pashkin, is coming to London to discuss his oil company and perhaps sign a big contract. James "Spider" Webb is convinced he can recruit Pashkin to become an asset to the West. But Lamb thinks there is something fishy about Pashkin. Lamb soon has the agents of Slough House investigating various leads. Since Lamb doesn't explain what he is thinking, the reader is not clear where all of this will lead. In the end, Herron ties up all the threads, the plots are unveiled, motives become clear. The cover says that Dead Lions won a CWA Gold Dagger award. It certainly merits a read, with its flawed characters, tricky plot, and clever dialogue.

If I have a complaint about the book, it is that sometimes the talk lapses into acronyms. Probably these acronyms are well understood in Herron's native England, but I had no idea what they were talking about. Book three in this series is called Real Tigers. I will have to procure it from our library.