Clown Town

The brand new Slough House thriller from the #1 bestseller Mick Herron
*Now an award-winning Apple TV+ series starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jack Lowden*
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'Mick Herron is our best and most topical spy writer' Ian Rankin
'Britain's finest living thriller writer' Sunday Express
'The man is a genius' The Spectator
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Spies lie. They betray. It's what they do.
Chief of the intelligence service, Diana Taverner, doesn't appreciate threats. So, when a team involved in a double-agent operation during the height of the Troubles are threatening to expose the truth and lay bare the dark side of state security, Taverner turns this blackmail into an opportunity.
Slow horse, River Cartwright, is out in the cold waiting to be passed fit for work. To kill time, and with his grandfather - a former head spy - long dead, River investigates the secrets of his private library where a book has gone missing. Or perhaps it never existed.
Back at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, Louisa Guy is pondering her future. Shirley Dander is wondering if the new kid, Ash Khan, is as annoying as she seems. Roddy Ho wants the team to know that his tattoo is a hummingbird, and not, as Lech Wicinski claims, a platypus. Catherine Standish just wants everyone to play nice and as far as Slough House's master, Jackson Lamb is concerned, they should all be at their desks.
Because when Taverner starts plotting mischief people get hurt, and Lamb has no plans to send in the clowns. On the other hand, if the clowns ignore his instructions and fool around, any harm that befalls them is hardly his fault.
But they're his clowns. And if they don't all come home, there'll be a reckoning.
Available to pre-order now!

Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have been published in over twenty-five languages and are the basis of the award-winning TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Among his other novels are the Zoë Boehm series, also now adapted for TV starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, and the standalone novels The Secret Hours and Nobody Walks. Mick's awards include the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Gold, Steel and Diamond Daggers. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.