London's Slough House is where washed-up M15 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. But now the 'slow horses' have a chance at redemption. An old Cold War-era spy is found dead on a bus outside Oxford, far from his usual haunts. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient secrets that seems to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, and a decades-old conspiracy with a...

"What happens when an old spook starts to lose his mind? Do the Services have a retirement home for people who know too many secrets but don't remember they're secrets? Or does someone come to take care of the senile spy for good? These are the questions River Cartwright must ask himself as his grandfather--David Cartwright, a Cold War-era operative--starts to forget to wear pants, and starts believing everyone in his life is someone sent by Services...

If Spook Street is where spies live, Joe Country is where they go to die. In Slough House, the London outpost for disgraced spies MI5, memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking over the ashes of lost love, and new recruit Lech Wicinski, whose sins make him outcast even among the slow horses, is determined to discover who destroyed his career, even if he tears his life apart in the process....

At last in one volume: the collected Slough House spy novellas, including the never-before-published Christmas interlude Standing by the Wall Espionage. Blackmail. Revenge. Cunning. Slapstick. State secrets dating back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, CWA Gold Dagger–winning author of Slow Horses. From the troubled recruitment of a new MI5 informant to a botched information transfer,...