Bad Actors

At MI5's London headquarters, a damaging scandal is taking shape that could humiliate the entire intelligence service. The Downing Street adviser who forecasts how voters will receive government policy has vanished. Claude Whelan, a former head of MI5, is charged with finding her, but his inquiry leads back to Regent's Park and points at First Desk Diana Taverner as the main suspect. Has Taverner finally pushed her luck too far?

Meanwhile, Moscow's First Desk, Taverner's Russian counterpart, has turned up in London and given his minders the slip. Whether the two incidents are connected is an open question. Across the city at Slough House, Jackson Lamb is in charge of a group of disgraced, resentful operatives who have been pushed out of MI5's main work. These slow horses carry on in their own way, adding fresh disorder to a situation that was already unstable.

The book looks at the people who move the levers of government, including politicians, lobbyists and purveyors of misinformation, in a world where deceit, betrayal and self-interest are routine. Decent people can find themselves badly outmatched there.

This is the eighth novel in Mick Herron's Slough House series of British spy fiction. The first book, Slow Horses, was adapted into an Apple TV series. Herron is a British author.