Mick Herron

The perfect, 21st century blend of John le Carré and Len Deighton, Herron lit a fire under the spy genre in 2010 with Slow Horses, the first in the series featuring Jackson Lamb, Herron’s world-weary but razor-sharp masterspy who’s not quite done yet.

Lamb heads up the Slow Horses team, a band of misfit MI5 agents, all of them in some way disgraced, sent to Slough House to see out their time as pen-pushers. This awkward squad of the British intelligence community, amongst all the service’s short-sighted tedium and bureaucracy, happen to be our best line of defence. Shot though with dark humour and authenticity, a kidnapping and threat of an online execution sets the slow horses in cunning motion; the plot is tight, the characters fully rounded.