Slough House is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up: left a secret file on a train, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They’re the service’s poor relations – the slow horses – and bitterest among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations. But when a young man is abducted, and it’s threatened that he’ll be beheaded live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. Is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers’ connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone involved has their own agenda...

Set in the same fictional London as his CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning Slough House spy series, Mick Herron now introduces Tom Bettany, a man with a violent past and only one thing to live for: Avenging his son’s death. Tom Bettany is working at a meat processing plant in France when he gets a voicemail from an Englishwoman he doesn’t know telling him that his estranged 26-year-old son is dead—Liam Bettany fell from his London balcony, where he was smoking pot.Now for the first time since he cut all ties years ago, Bettany returns home to London to find out the truth about his son’s death. Maybe it’s the guilt he feels about losing touch with Liam that’s gnawing at him, or maybe he’s actually put his finger on a labyrinthine plot, but either way he’ll get to the bottom of the tragedy, no matter whose feathers he has to ruffle. But more than a few people are interested to hear Bettany is back in town, from incarcerated mob bosses to those in the highest echelons of MI5. He might have thought he’d left it all behind when he first skipped town, but nobody ever really walks away.

When a man with a gun breaks into her school, nursery teacher Louise Kennedy knows there's not likely to be a happy ending. But Jaime isn't there on a homicidal whim, and is as scared as the hostages he's taken.

When a body is hauled from the River Tyne, Sarah Tucker heads north for a closer look. She identifies the dead woman as private detective Zoe Boehm, but putting a name to the corpse only raises further questions. Did Zoe kill herself, or did one of her old cases come looking for her?

Tim's depressive plans for the remainder of his life are redirected by the troubles of the secretive Katrina, while a trio of heirs plots a violent get-rich scheme, and Zo‰ inadvertently risks her life to track down jewel robbers.

Zoèe Boehm heads to London to investigate the death of Caroline Daniels, who 'fell' under the wheels of a train, as well as the case of twelve-year-old Wez, killed by a fall, and finds herself in pursuit of two elusive killers.

Becoming obsessed with uncovering the fate of a child who disappeared in the aftermath of a local gas explosion, disenchanted Oxford resident Sarah Tucker is astonished when her investigation turns up people who are believed to be dead.