London Rules

Critics Review

• The new spy master

  Evening Standard

• The new king of the spy thriller

  Mail on Sunday

• The best modern British spy series

  Daily Express

• Dazzingly inventive. Superbly orchestrated . . . Lamb – the most fascinating and irresistible thriller series hero to emerge since Jack Reacher

  Sunday Times

• He’s been called the heir to Len Deighton – and Mick Herron’s latest mordantly funny espionage novel only backs that up

  Sunday Times

• London Rules confirms Mick Herron as the greatest comic writer of spy fiction in the English language, and possibly all crime fiction

  The Times

• Le Carré looks sugar-coated next to the acid Slough House novels . . . as a master of wit, satire, insight and that very English trick of disguising heartfelt writing as detached irony before launching a surprise assault on the reader’s emotions, Herron is difficult to overpraise

  Daily Telegraph

• Addictive . . . I cannot recommend these books strongly enough

  Nick Lezard, The Spectator

• The fifth instalment of the award-winning Jackson Lamb series is witty, sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny yet also thrilling and thought-provoking . . . Herron has often been compared with spy thriller greats John le Carré and Len Deighton but it is time he was recognised in his own right as the best thriller writer in Britain today. In a series that never lets its fans down, London Rules is the best instalment yet

  Sunday Express, *****

• It is, as ever, a joy to return to this world: there is a warm, wise, amused depth to Herron’s writing, which shines a stark light on the atrocities he describes. He’s also horribly funny

  Observer

• Superb new Jackson Lamb thriller

  Irish Times

• Mick Herron is the John le Carré of our generation

  Val McDermid

• This year’s discoveries for me were the spy novels of Mick Herron . . . Herron’s Jackson Lamb books are mesmerisingly good, combining the best double, triple and quadruple-crossing traditions of Len Deighton and early Le Carré with the mordant humour of Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels

  Marcus Berkmann, Spectator Books of the Year

• London Rules is well up to the high standard of its predecessors, with the usual mixture of jokes and jeopardy at Slough House, the place where MI5 careers go to die under the dubious auspices of the wonderfully repulsive Jackson Lamb

  Guardian, Books of the Year 2018

• Fortunately, Mick Herron seems to write a new Jackson Lamb novel every year. His latest in this series of wonderful and witty books about the more than eccentric head of a branch of MI5, London Rules, came out on time. I read the first four of these thrillers in a couple of weeks last year. The latest is well up to Herron’s usual standards

  Chris Patten, New Statesman Best Books of 2018

• London Rules by Mick Herron is the latest – and so far the best – bulletin from that twilight home for burned-out spies by the Barbican, Slough House . . . If you haven’t read Herron yet you should

  Evening Standard, Best Crime Novels of 2018

• This is modern British spy fiction at its brilliant best; taut, tense, quirky, funny and thrilling

  Choice

• Herron’s comic brilliance should not overshadow the fact that his books are frequently thrilling, often thought-provoking, and sometimes moving and even inspiring. Reading one of Herron’s worst books would be the highlight of my month and London Rules is one of his best

  Sunday Express

• London Rules takes the Jackson Lamb series to new levels of nerve-shredding tension, leavened as always with moments of eye-watering hilarity – often on the same page

  Christopher Brookmyre

• The great triumph of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb books – apart from the sly wit, the clever plots and the characters – is his creation of a hilariously plausible, complete and utterly original intelligence world, in which cock-up always trumps conspiracy, the small-minded and rampantly egotistical rise to the top, and defeat is almost always snatched from the jaws of victory

  M J Carter

• Jackson Lamb is one of the most singularly offensive, cruel and heartless – but above all funny – fictional creations of recent times . . . Similar in the tones of Len Deighton, devoid of all glamour, grimly realistic and brutal and darkly hilarious, London Rules further burnishes Mick Herron’s reputation as the finest spy novelist of his generation

  Irish Examiner

• London Rules may be the best Jackson Lamb thriller yet, and that’s saying something, considering how brilliant the previous ones are

  Mark Billingham

• Sharper, funnier and more distorted than ever

  Literary Review

• Excellent espionage tale that is also very funny without becoming Carry On Le Carré

  The Sun

• Herron adeptly negotiates the rules of satire and the laws of libel to create fictional public figures who simultaneously hit more than one real-life bullseye…Stylistically, Herron’s narrative voice swoops from the high to the low but it’s the dialogue that zings: the screenwriters of the inevitable TV version won’t have to change much… Herron is a very funny writer, but also a serious plotter

  Guardian

• the most remarkable and mesmerising series of novels, set mostly and explicitly in London, to have appeared in years. It is hypnotically fascinating, absolutely contemporary, cynical and hopeful

  The Arts Desk

• London Rules epitomises precisely why Mick Herron’s espionage novels are the new hallmarks of the genre. It’s a rousing, provocative – and genuinely funny, at times – political thriller with a labyrinthine plot

  Simon McDonald

• Jackson Lamb – subtle of brain but outrageously gross in almost every other way – still rules over his band of misfit agents in this fifth title in Herron’s hilarious take on the contemporary spy thriller. Based at decrepit Slough House, dumping ground for the security services’ awkward squad, his team get the jump on their disdainful colleagues when a weird terrorist plot starts to play out

  Sunday Times Crime Club

• If Slough House on Aldersgate Street EC1 really existed it would already rival the Old Curiosity Shop on Portsmouth Street WC2 as a landmark of literary London . . . Herron has read his Carl Hiaasen as well as his Charles Dickens. The coruscating cynicism and cartoon comedy do not detract from the seriousness of the message: ‘Hate crime pollutes the soul, but only the souls of those who commit it’

  Evening Standard

• The fifth instalment of the award-winning Jackson Lamb series is witty, sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny yet also thrilling and thought-provoking. Not many people can turn a terror attack into a farce but Herron achieves it with a cleverly constructed story, well-rounded characters and poetic prose. Herron has often been compared with spy thriller greats John le Carré and Len Deighton but it is time he was recognised in his own right as the best thriller writer in Britain today. In a series that never lets its fans down, London Rules is the best instalment yet

  Sunday Express, *****

• By turns gripping and laugh-out-loud funny, with few concessions to the stifling modern cult of you-can’t-say-that

  Daily Mail, Books of the Year 2018

• So funny that you might easily miss the bleak pain of many of the characters involved

  Literary Review

• The curmudgeonly spymaster Jackson Lamb and his superannuated colleagues go from strength to strength, with Herron balancing suspenseful counterterrorism antics with black farce

  The i, Best Books of 2018

• The permanently sozzled and flatulent Jackson Lamb, a former spook now reduced to managing disgraced spies at Slough House, is one of modern literature’s greatest creations

  Ben Walsh, Evening Standard

• Mick Herron’s London Rules the fifth in his blackly comic Jackson Lamb spy series, got the year off to a cracking start as it filleted the pretensions of Britain’s contemporary intelligence forces

  Irish Times, Book of the Year

• Witty, thrilling and thought-provoking, it is Herron’s best novel yet

  Daily Express