(SLOUGH HOUSE/JACKSON LAMB THRILLER #1): SLOW HORSES.

SLOW HORSES by MICK HERRON.

BACK COVER BLURB: Slough House is a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who've screwed up: left a service file on a train, say, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They're the service's poor relations - the slow horses - and most bitter among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.

 But when a young man is abducted, and his kidnappers threaten to behead him live on the internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what's the kidnappers' connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone involved has their own agenda ...

FIRST SENTENCE {1}: This is how River Cartwright slipped off the track and joined the slow horses.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {PAGE 138}: The kitchen wasn't anywhere you'd want to cook a meal. On the other hand, it wasn't anywhere a meal had been cooked; its surfaces piled with takeaway containers and plastic cutlery, with greasy brown paper bags and pizza boxes, with empty soft drink bottles and discarded cigarette packets.  Ashtrays had been made out of anything that didn't move.

SOURCE: A book club read.

READ FOR: Not applicable.

MY THOUGHTS: Hmm! Where to begin? The size of print seems as good a place as any.

I can't speak for every format/edition but this, a 2016 John Murray paperback copy, had incredibly small print. Not something that in years gone by would have put me off a book much less led me to comment on it but, my eye sight not being what it once was, despite glasses, I struggled.

Anyway ... to the book.

An OK read. I'm not sure how much of the satire (to say nothing of the metaphors and hypothethicals of which the book is full of) went over my head but then this tends to be the case with humour, you either get it ... or you don't. 

Full of various 'slow horses' (spies who have basically screwed up in one way or another). Despite my best intentions I'm afraid at times I simply couldn't help but think of a spectrum comprising Mr Bean from his least gawky to his, well, not quite (but almost) most gawky. No bad thing given that it is these characters, this motley crew of the overweight, the ill-mannered, the down-right incompetent, rather than the plot, that made the book for me.