The CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage novel about disgraced MI5 agents who inadvertently uncover a deadly Cold War-era legacy of sleeper cells and mythic super spies.
The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts.
But the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?
Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and the novella The List) and four Oxford mysteries (Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers), as well as the standalone novels Reconstruction, Nobody Walks and This Is What Happened. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.
Show more
The CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage novel about disgraced MI5 agents who inadvertently uncover a deadly Cold War-era legacy of sleeper cells and mythic super spies.
The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts.
But the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?
Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and the novella The List) and four Oxford mysteries (Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers), as well as the standalone novels Reconstruction, Nobody Walks and This Is What Happened. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.
Show moreMick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of the Slough House espionage series, four Oxford mysteries, and several standalone novels. His work has won the CWA Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement in Crime Writing, the Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.
Praise for DEAD LIONS
Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel
A BBC Front Row Best Crime Novel of the Year
A Times Best Crime and Thriller Book of the Year
Winner of the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize
A Sunday Times Top 50 Crime and Thriller Book of the Past 5
Years
A 2014 Barry Award Nominee
A 2014 Macavity Award Nominee
“Smart, sharp British wit at its finest. A uniquely brilliant take
on the British spy novel.”
─Cara Black, New York Times bestselling author of Murder Below
Montparnasse
“Funny, clever . . . Genuinely thrilling. The novel is equally
noteworthy for its often lyrical prose.”
─Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“A great romp.”
─Jeff Park, BBC Front Row
“Delightful . . . with a dry humor reminiscent of Greene and
Waugh.”
—Sunday Times, Best Thrillers and Crime Novels of the Past 5
Years
“Clever and funny.”
─The Times
“Herron delivers unbeatable entertainment for thriller fans.”
─Library Journal, Starred Review
“[A] wickedly clever send-up of the classic British spy novel.”
─Crime Writers' Association
“If you like your suspense novels told with a smart dash of wit and
sarcasm, filled with lots of twists and turns, Herron's your
man.”
─Shelf Awareness
“[Dead Lions] features some of the twistiest plotlines in crime
fiction...[and] is beautifully written but also elegantly
structured . . . Ever since finishing Slow Horses, I've been
waiting for a possible sequel. Now that it's here, I have the
pleasure of experiencing it, along with the pang of having finished
it.”
─International Noir Fiction
"Herron provides a dour, twisty spy thriller with something for
everyone: part post–Cold War miasma, part James Bond heroics, and
elliptical withal."
─Kirkus Reviews
“Dead Lions is at once a finely wrought thriller and a farcical,
fiercely pointed tale of political greed and bureaucratic
corruption. Mick Herron writes like a dream.”
─Open Letters Monthly
“A surreal, cynical, yet amusing look at the world of British
intelligence . . . a looking-glass world that features KGB
undercover agents, a Russian oligarch, a text message on a mobile
phone and the ghost of a fabled Soviet spymaster who may not be
real . . . an amusing, serpentine plot that takes readers as far
from the glamorous world of Ian Fleming’s tuxedo-wearing spy as
could be imagined.”
─January Magazine, Best Books of 2013
“Full of style and cynical humor . . . Has all the
punch-your-lights-out action of a movie thriller.”
─Read Me Deadly
Praise for Mick Herron
“[Herron's] cleverly plotted page-turners are driven by dialogue
that bristles with one-liners. Much of the humor comes from
Herron’s sharp eye for the way bureaucracies, whether corporate or
clandestine, function and malfunction. The world of Slough House is
closer to “The Office” than to 007.”
—The Associated Press
“The sharpest spy fiction since John le Carré.”
—NPR's Fresh Air
“Compulsively readable, tightly plotted.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Mick Herron never tells a suspense story in the expected way . . .
In Herron's book, there is no hiding under the desk.”
─The New York Times Book Review
“Stylish and engaging.”
─The Washington Post
"The best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the
funniest."
–Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
“[A] masterful thriller . . . The intricate plot, coupled with
Herron's breezy writing style, results in superior entertainment
that makes most other novels of suspense appear dull and
slow-witted by comparison.”
─Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Like a good movie . . . grabs the reader from the first page.”
─Booklist, Starred Review
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