Review: London Rules

London Rules by Mick Herron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Roddy Ho has a girlfriend. I repeat Roddy Ho has a girlfriend.

Having got rid of the Bo-Jo lookie-likee Mick Herron now turns his thinly disguised lens to the Clacton scourge Nigel Smug-arge, in a showboating character who defects from the Tories to join a right-wing party so vile that even he can't stomach them. Determined to destabilise the PM (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Liz Jockstrap (sorry I saw it on a Gogglebox repeat last night - 'Truss, its like jockstrap isn't it?') by disclosing at a public meeting that her latest Muslim protegee has been doing something untoward. The showboat is aided and abetted by his wife, a tabloid journalist who intends to publish the incriminating evidence. Meanwhile, said Muslim is likely to be the next Mayor of a major regional city, he has weathered the news that his brother became radicalised and was killed in a targeted missile strike, and is well-known for supporting ex-cons and helping them to find work.

The UK is being hit by a seemingly unconnected series of attacks, possibly by a group of incompetents, but J.K. Coe with his amazing memory figures out that someone might have resurrected an old British playbook and is using it against them.

This is probably the first book where I noted that Herron often uses the trick of misdirection, describing something which leads your mind to imagine X and then later you discover it wasn't even a letter of the alphabet - unfortunately, in the next book I found it more irritating than clever, but I digress.

Can the Slow Horses foil the incompetent terrorists before they complete their mission?

I enjoyed this, the humour, particularly in relation to Roddy Ho, was off the scale and I particularly liked the Jason Stillborn quip (still snorting with laughter just typing it), but the body count is becoming stratospheric and I am starting to feel that some new characters maybe the spy equivalent of the Star Trek redshirt.

On to the next one, which as you may have gathered I have already read :)

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