Spies lie. They betray. It’s what they do.
Slow horse River Cartwright is waiting to be passed fit for work. With time to kill, and with his grandfather – a legendary former spy – long dead, River investigates the secrets of the old man’s library, and a mysteriously missing book.
Regent’s Park’s First Desk, Diana Taverner, doesn’t appreciate threats. So when those involved in a covert operation during the height of the Troubles threaten to expose the ugly side of state security, Taverner turns blackmail into opportunity.
Over at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, Catherine Standish just wants everyone to play nice. But as far as Jackson Lamb is concerned, the slow horses should all be at their desks.
Because when Taverner starts plotting mischief people get hurt, and Lamb has no plans to send in the clowns. On the other hand, if the clowns ignore his instructions and fool around, any harm that befalls them is hardly his fault.
But they’re his clowns. And if they don’t all come home, there’ll be a reckoning.

‘Clown Town‘ delivers everything I expect of a Slough House novel: lyrical prose twisted into a self-mocking sneer, a sense of having an insider view on contemporary British politics, a twisty mystery with deep roots, intrigue, betrayal, violence, death and disappointment that verges on despair. 

The book opens with a dramatic and graphically violent, but mostly unexplained, execution that hangs over the plot like a threat or a blood stain slowly seeping through a ceiling.

The first third of the book is split between re-engaging the reader with the main characters in Slough House and The Park and charting the emergence of a whirlpool of chaos that the reader knows they will all be dragged into.

The middle section demonstrated Mick Herron’s skill in getting me to care about the Slow Horses while making it clear that it’s unlikely that all of them will survive to the end of the book. His pacing and exposition kept me engaged, while slowly ratcheting up the tension. 

The last third of the book consists of two carefully orchestrated descents into chaos, each culminating in violent and unexpected outcomes.

As a thriller, ‘Clown Town‘ is hard to fault. It kept pressing my buttons and pulling me along into the complex and depressing mess that the plot creates.

And yet….

…to my surprise, my overall reaction when i finished the book was weariness.

I have grown weary of the purgatorial nature of Slough House. Weary of Jackson Lamb’s abuse of himself and everyone around him. Weary of Taverner’s endless self-serving machinations. Weary of the losses the Slow Horses always suffer. Even weary of Mick Herron’s heavily embroidered prose, which starts to feel as manipulative and depressing as Jackson Lamb’s dialogue.

This is not like the fatigue I sometimes get when a series has been going on for too long and is starting to lose its power.

It’s almost the opposite of that. This is a weariness that comes from believing in the world and the people that Mick Herron has created, seeing them as a commentary on where my country is going and knowing that things do change but they never get better.

The dramatic events that conclude ‘Clown Town’ seem to throw everything up in the air and to place everyone in Slough House at risk. The story ended before the fallout became clear, yet I didn’t feel it was a cliff-hanger ending, but rather that it reflected the reality that the messes never end. 

It seems to me that, if there is a tenth Slough House book, it may well be the last.