Book Review: “Bad Actors” by Mick Herron

Bad Actors (2022) by Mick Herron
Slough House (2021) by Mick Herron

I hadn’t read Herron before, so this was my introduction to his work, and to the slow horses of Slough House.  Wow!  I’ll be reading his earlier books, for sure.

BAd Actors is the eight book of Slough House, Slough House is the seventh; so there is a lot of history—all of it dark, disastrous, and probably hilarious.  Because that’s what this book is.

The action is pretty standard British espionage, although in the UK today the government is mostly fighting itself.  Set in post-Brexit, post-Covid, Johnsonian Britain, it’s impossible not to be satirical.

The best thing, though, is the writing.  It’s complicated, interweaving first person accounts of a dozen or more protagonists.  (And I do mean interweave—many transitions are unmarked and very sudden.)

The protagonists are the most comprehensively broken set of spies I’ve ever seen.  Even on a good day, spies (and politicians) are twisted and bleeding inside.  These “slow horses” are the ones who are even more broken than that.

Which makes them interesting. 

Herron somehow makes them appealing, despite their massive flaws and really, really bad attitudes.

The stories themselves are insane, the action intense and crazy.  Slough House is sucked into dangerous and confusing events at the highest levels.   The slow horses are confused (and dangerous) to begin with, and no one really knows what’s going on.  This is a formula for catastrophe—as usual.

I gather that there is a TV show based on these books.  I haven’t seen it, but I’m not optimistic that it will work very well.  There is a lot of action and some snappy dialog in this book, but without the stream of consciousness, the good writing; it’s going to be basically slapstick. Which is nothing, really.

These books are funny, but they are not slapstick.

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1. Mick Herron, Bad Actors, New York, Soho Crime, 2022.
2. Mick Herron, Slough House, New York, Soho Crime, 2021.

Sunday Book Reviews