Another brilliant volume in the wonderful Slow Horses saga. Jackson Lamb is as disgusting and brilliant as ever, with the Slow Horses needing to save the day from the arrogance and pervasive politics of the intelligence service leaders. All of the Slow Horses are fighting some inner demon: an addiction, anger issues, or a past mistake that cannot be undone. Yet, despite the odds, they manage to pull together as a unit and save the day. Fun, funny, and suspenseful. I love these Slow Horses!
The fourth Slow Horses book was fun. These books follow a formula, yet are so well written. These aren’t the kind of books you analyze for themes or highlight many passages. They’re just good, well-written entertainment. It will be interesting to watch Season Four on TV now that I’ve read the book. Maybe there will be more departures from the book?
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.
The second installment of the Slow Horses series. This one departed enough from the TV series to keep me guessing. Jackson Lamb is such a terrific character. Perhaps not great literature, but engaging and fun.
I enjoyed this book and its writing style. It would have been better if I didn’t already know the story from watching the TV series, but the fact that it was still as good as it was when I knew everything that was going to happen earns a five-star rating in my book. The TV show was good, but the writing here is terrific, and the character development is so much richer than what can be done on screen.
Highlights
Most of us hold that some things only happen to other people. Many of us hold that one such thing is death.
Lamb’s laugh wasn’t a genuine surrender to amusement; more of a temporary derangement. Not a laugh you’d want to hear from anyone holding a stick.
The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks.
To outward appearances Taverner was a suit, but her heart belonged with the field guys, the handlers. Besides, if you removed operations from the curriculum, security didn’t amount to more than putting on a peaked cap and a shiny badge. As far as the war on terror went, you might as well start digging trenches, and handing out tin hats.
Alcohol thickened the syllables, and slurred the sibilants.
A long, meandering, indulgent spy novel by an author whose prose is typically tight as a drum. This novel felt intimate and autobiographical, as if Le Carre were explaining the abuses he endured as a child through a novel. It wasn’t what I expected, which is OK. I’m not sure I would consider this one of his best novels. 3.5 stars?
My first John D. MacDonald novel–this one with his famous protagonist Travis McGee. I liked the Florida boat setting and MacDonald’s frequent use of sharing his opinions on excess consumerism, “normal” 9 – 5 living, and the vagaries of human nature. The writing about women is so dated, but this was written in 1964.
The third installment of the Nero Wolfe mystery series. A muscle man who’s quite a thinker himself is the protagonist in these books. Wolfe is the enigma that we collectively marvel at for his brilliance and idiosyncrasies. Reading this book after just finishing Storycraft by Jack Hart forced me to look at the joinery work and finishing of the plot and how it moved along. One of the downsides of studying the craft of writing is that some of the enthralling magic of the story fades away as you better understand what the author is doing.
