Slow Horses (Slough House #1), by Mick Herron

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Slow Horses by Mick Herron was excessively true to its name – it’s a very slow, half-dead horse that gets beaten and bogged down by its own limping pace. And I considered myself in danger of dying from boredom.

The entire first quarter consists almost exclusively of introductions to the characters and their world. Until half the book was behind me, a person had been kidnapped and that was pretty much all. Lots of foreshadowing happens, e. g. “x is going to happen”, “y is going to happen”, etc. etc. and, yes, that’s usually technically true but also entirely irrelevant for the story and the entire novel.

Also annoying were the excessively long chapters – the aforementioned 25% of the book are only three chapters…

The pace very slightly picked up during the final third of this novel but it was way too late and by far not enough to keep my interest. It also didn’t help that I didn’t care about any of the characters at all.

Only once did I actually sympathise with our wanna-be hero River…

»River had a sudden image of darkened rooms all over the country, all over the world; heads bent over monitors, studying iPhones, watching nothing happening, slowly.«

… because I also felt like that when reading this novel!

Two stars out of five.


Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam




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