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Snafu at Slough House: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron, reviewed

14 May 2022

9:00 AM

14 May 2022

9:00 AM

Bad Actors Mick Herron

Baskerville, pp.352, 18.99

Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it: here’s mine. Anyone who tries to understand modern Britain through its fiction but overlooks Mick Herron’s satirical thrillers merits a punishment posting to the critics’ version of Slough House. That noxious midden of a building opposite the Barbican, its leprous chambers groaning like ‘the internal organs of some giant, diseased beast’, is a sort of landfill site for failed spies.

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