★★★★☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My third Slow Horses book. The plot of this one followed the TV series pretty closely, though there are more differences than the first two. The allure here is the continued depth of characters that grow and develop from book to book. Herron throws these well-established characters into tension and conflict and they respond predictably. It’s up to the author to put them into tighter and tighter binds to avoid becoming cliche. I’ll bet in later books, he has the characters become less predictable, otherwise this could feel a little too much like Star Trek novels. We’ll see.
Highlights
Taking another drink was not about lapsing. It was about becoming someone she planned never to be again.
Alcohol used to blur the edges of even the roughest days. Now she had to rely on other comforts, and the days never quite became smooth.
Fate was the kind of attack dog you didn’t want to taunt.
One thing everyone knew about alcoholism was, it wasn’t like the flu. You didn’t shake it off and carry on; you tamped it down and hoped it wouldn’t reignite.
Old Bastard had steered the Service through the Cold War without ever actually taking the helm—the real power, he’d told River more than once, lay in having one hand on the elbow of whoever was in charge.