Review - Clown Town by Mick Herron

Clown Town

Mick Herron
Baskerville, 11 September 2025 
Available as: HB, 340pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399800433  

I'm grateful to Baskerville for sending me an advance copy of Clown Town to consider for review.

Clown Town sees a full return to Slough House for Herron after last year's sort-of Jackson Lamb backstory, The Secret Hours. And this is a familiar Slough House, an office gone bad, a dusty, sticky, despair-haunted tomb for the careers of its crew of Service internal exiles.

Yes, the gang's all here again, River, not yet back on active duty after his brush with novichok; Louisa; Roddy; Lech; Roddy Ho; newcomer Ash; Catherine; and, of course, Lamb himself. All the Slow Horses are ready to go... slowly.

And yet. I wouldn't have thought this possible, but the Slough House we see here is actually less jolly, more bleak - somehow - than in the earlier books. It's as though Lamb has, somehow, brought back extra weights from the past Berlin of The Secret Hours, weights that drag on the spirit and chill the mind. Perhaps it's that the Slow Horses are reeling from the losses and near losses they have suffered. From missing faces and empty office chairs. The attrition has been brutal - surely one of the perks of being a down-and-out on Spook Street is that you're insignificant, gently rotting down a side alley, of no interest to the Big Men (and Women) who hunt down the main drag?

Of course that's not how it's turned out, and maybe Lamb's lot are starting to realise. Whatever, when the shadow of past Service malpractice arises, when Peter Judd begins to stir, when Taverner starts to weave her threads, there's more than a smidgen of wariness to be seen. Plus, with key members of the team signed off, pondering jumping ship, or (Louisa) actually resigned, the response to these challenges is particularly fragmented. More so than ever, I felt myself muttering "just walk away". Even Lamb seems, if such a thing were possible, less enthusiastic than normal to look under stones and join dots.

The story kicks off from a minor discrepancy in the library of River's grandfather, the OB, as reassembled in a spook-linked Oxford college. River, still, as I said, signed off, has time to look into this, and it shouldn't open any forbidden doors, should it? Well, of course it does, and we soon discover that Slough House isn't the only scrapyard for the Service's embarrassments. So that's two teams turning through the dustbins on Spook Street, but there are actually more, and there'll be encounters, near misses and misunderstandings.

The ending of the book is of a piece with that. There's a glorious (gloriously written, not a triumphant event) - a marvellous performance by not just the Slow Horses but by several other teams of clowns, which must have been a real swine for ringmaster Herron to write; a tour de force of incompetence, dark humour, muddled motives and bad luck - but that isn't the climax of the book, it delivers another sucker punch just when you think things can't get darker, leaving the already tarnished morality of this world even more shabby at the end.

A gripping, twisty and melancholy story, though one often enlivened by Herron's deadpan humour (the highpoint of which was, for me, the song that goes through Roddy's head. It sounded familiar to me. Where have I heard it? On TV somewhere, perhaps...)

For more information about Clown Town, see the publisher's website here.