Pun Salad

Checked out from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, I was expecting a leisurely read over 14 days or so. Instead, I gobbled it up in six days. Not exactly "couldn't put it down", but as close as I come these days.

It is the basis for the fourth season of AppleTV's Slow Horses, which I watched earlier this year. It starts off with a (literal) bang as [page 4 spoiler] an apparent terrorist explodes himself, killing dozens of shoppers at a London mall. And in a seemingly unrelated plot thread, one of the Slow Horses, River Cartwright, is concerned about his grandfather's worsening dementia. Which quickly turns into unexpected carnage at Grandpa's house.

There's the usual tension between Jackson Lamb's stable of misfit spies at Slough House and the more "respectable" Secret Service bureaucracy across town at "the Park". Those politics can be nearly as dangerous to our heroes as the plots hatched by evildoers.

As usual, Lamb utters his usual devastatingly funny commentary on the dysfunction and misadventures going on around him. And manages, once again, to stay (mostly) a couple steps ahead of his antagonists, internal and external.