Dead Lions - Mick Herron

Consigned to Slough House, the dumping ground for the British Intelligence service, the intention is to keep those agents who have screwed up in the past out of harm's way. And yet, Jackson Lamb's sorry little unit can't seem to keep out of trouble. Even more improbably in Dead Lions, someone back at headquarter in Regents Park has decided to involve them in an operation, taking them away from their tedious administrative tasks and actually set them loose in the field.

You'd think that Min Harper and Louisa Guy might be just a bit suspicious, particularly as their previous dealings have shown that James 'Spider' Webb is not someone to be trusted, but an op is an op, and it beats rotting away doing mundane time-wasting tasks in Slough House. All Webb wants is for them to 'vet' and look out for a Russian Oligarch and oil businessman Arkady Pashkin, who is due to visit London.

Webb has his own reasons for the meeting, and by involving Slough House he obviously wants to keep it off the books. For Min and Louisa it's a risk worth taking; if this turns out well all previous mistakes might be forgiven and it could be a way back to Regents Park. The odds of returning to Regents Park from Slough House are slim - it's never happened - but the odds of things turning out well are just as unlikely.

Particularly as there is something else worrying their boss, Jackson Lamb. An old spook, not a major player by any means, has been found dead on a bus transfer from Reading to Oxford. There's nothing much to suggest it was anything suspicious, but Lamb has found some clues pointing to an old Soviet bogeyman, Alexander Popov. But why has this come up now, and is it not a bit too convenient? Well, there's only one way to find out what is going on and that's to follow it up.

Bluff and double-bluff is often the way in the spook game, agents and double agents, and even more so in Mick Herron's comedy espionage thrillers, where it's often a case of screw-ups and double screw-ups. Are Lamb's Slough House team playing the game or being played? Herron plays to the conventions with an eye towards humour and grotesque characters, but also with an eye to topicality in political screw-ups that makes this series realistic and entertaining.

As far as Dead Lions is concerned - the second book in the Slough House/Jackson Lamb series - it takes a while to get moving, Herron only starting to really hit his stride mid-way through, having laid the ground work, dropped hints and distractions like a good spook. Once it kicks off however, it's thrilling and witty, filled with the kind of one-liners that would take the series even further into humour in its follow-up Real Tigers. Dead Lions however has a good blend of espionage intrigue, old school cold war paranoia, contemporary terror alert tensions, all mixed in with the peculiarities of English people and officials, a combination that ensures a healthy amount of satire and humour.