Mick Herron

Mick Herron is a British author best known for the Slough House series (also published as the Jackson Lamb novels or Slow Horses), a critically acclaimed spy fiction series following a squad of disgraced MI5 officers exiled to a dead-end administrative posting under the deliberately repugnant, foul-mouthed Jackson Lamb. Beginning with Slow Horses in 2010, the series has been widely praised for reinventing the British spy novel with dark comedy, cutting satire of intelligence-service bureaucracy and contemporary British politics, and genuinely tense plotting. It was adapted into the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, which brought Herron's work to a vastly wider international audience.

Herron worked for years as a sub-editor before turning to fiction, and before Slough House he wrote the little-known Oxford-set Zoe Boehm mystery series. His prose is known for sharp, quotable dialogue and a bleakly comic sensibility applied to real anxieties about surveillance, security-state failure, and institutional cowardice. New readers should start with Slow Horses, since the ensemble cast and their fates accumulate across the series, sometimes brutally. He continues to publish new Slough House novels and novellas regularly, and the television adaptation has continued to run alongside new book releases.