I have to admit, this one took me a bit to get into. It is written in what seems like a typically "dense" British spy novel manner, a la John le Carre, where every word can matter and plenty goes unsaid but implied. There was also plenty of set up, which is to be expected, I guess, for the first novel in a spy series (the Slough House series is currently at 7 books), so quite a bit of the beginning of the book is taken up by introducing you to the various players at Slough House, a spot where basically British spies are presumably put out to pasture after a particularly egregious screw up.

So I didn't read it very quickly which was probably a mistake. Because, like I said, everything in the end matters and sometimes I lost the thread of things. There is a lot going on, both specifically written about and obliquely hinted at and it would have behooved me to have read this a bit more quickly. In other words, I shouldn't have been a slow horse - ha!

But every time I picked the book up again (metaphorically, of course, as I am an ebook reader these days), I would find myself more and more engrossed in the story of how some higher echelon folks wanted to pin their own screwups on this lot of screwups. But the head screwup, Jackson Lamb, won't let that happen and gets the group to band together and kind of solve the problem.

So, in the end, this was a great read. The last third I couldn't stop reading, which is a good thing, because I doubt I could have untangled it again. The story is told with plenty of jumping from one place in the action to the other, but you are never sure where, exactly, in the chronology you will end up. But it ties together well at the end.

It is also told with plenty of humor, both just funny and also a British dark humor. There were a few British idioms I didn't understand (for fellow non-British types, "a small gonk" is a tchotchke, a small troll like toy, for instance), but in general, it was a fantastic read and I am anxious to see where Lamb takes this bunch of losers in the second book, Dead Lions.