A German couple recently went on holiday in the Austrian Alps, and found a four-star hotel in the village of Gerlos.  To their shock, in the lobby were two framed photographs of men in World…

This was a surprising book. I expected an account of the numerous small-scale attempts by individuals and tiny groups of decent Germans to oppose the Nazi regime, such as the famous White Rose group. Instead,…

‘Joe’ in this case is slang for a secret agent. This book, the sixth and latest (but not last) of the series is set in Slough House, the place where the British secret service discards…

OK, I’ve said this before and I have to say it again: plot is not Mick Herron’s greatest strength. In this book, the fifth in the Slough House series, a bunch of terrorists blow up…

On October 30, 1972 a little-known author named Arthur Tobier published a book entitled How McGovern Won the Presidency and Why the Polls Were Wrong. The New York Times described the book as “perhaps premature”. A…

Let me start by saying that having now read the first four books in the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, I think we can pretty well give up on any expectation that the plots are going…

The name of Roman Malinovsky is little remembered today, but this was not the case a bit more than a century ago. Malinovsky was one of the most important figures in the Bolshevik Party in…

The third volume in Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series of thrillers continues to be as good as promised. Each of the books sees one or more members of his ‘slow horses’ team leave the team…

The second of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb thrillers is as good as the first. But … you have to love the characters. Perhaps ‘love’ is the wrong way of putting it. They are, generally, not…

To be honest, I never heard of Mick Herron — but having just read a review of the sixth book in the series, I thought I’d give it a go. And I’m hooked. Herron has…