Slow Horses

Slow Horses is an espionage novel by the British writer Mick Herron, published in 2010 as the first of the Slough House series. The office it is named after is where the intelligence service sends the people it cannot quite dismiss.

Slough House is run by Jackson Lamb, a cantankerous survivor of the Cold War who now presides over a staff of failures. River Cartwright shut down London King's Cross station during a training exercise and has insisted ever since that he was fed false information, Louisa Guy lost an arms dealer, Min Harper left confidential papers on a train, and Roddy Ho is simply unbearable to be near.

Every one of them has a reason for being there and none of them wants to be. When a British-Pakistani university student named Hassan Ahmed is kidnapped and held hostage, the office is drawn into an operation the service would rather keep away from, and River does everything he can to get involved. The novel is as much about office politics and humiliation as it is about the plot.