Clown Town by Mick Herron review more fun and games with the Slow Horses

"Trigger warning: the new Slough House novel shares its name, I assume accidentally, with a particularly bleak soft-play centre on London's North Circular Road in which sticky under-fives circulate through an infernal apparatus wailing and stabbing each other with plastic forks while the grownups sit at plastic tables drinking horrible coffee and waiting for death. Just a glimpse at the dust jacket sent me back a decade to that environment of grubbiness, boredom and mild peril."

"That said, as far as I know, none of the injuries in the real-world Clown Town will have been occasioned by the victim being held down so the front wheel of a Land Rover Defender can be driven over their head which is the attention-grabbing scene with which Herron opens this latest instalment. As often, Herron's plot takes off from real-world events:"

"Pitchfork's story was covered up until it wasn't. His old handlers have come out of the woodwork and, to mix metaphors, the sky soon grows dark with chickens coming home to roost. Herron's hero River Cartwright (whose late grandfather's archive, we discover, contained crucial material about Pitchfork) starts pulling on a thread. The Service's First Desk, the machiavellian Diana Taverner, launches another of her fiendish schemes and is soon once again sparring with the Slow Horses' profane ringmaster Jackson Lamb."

The story opens with a gruesome, attention-grabbing scene in which a victim is held down while the front wheel of a Land Rover Defender is driven over their head. The plot draws on the real-world Stakeknife scandal, centering on Pitchfork, an IRA enforcer whose signature method was running over people's heads, and the long-running cover-up of his crimes. Former handlers re-emerge as past secrets unravel. River Cartwright uncovers archival material that starts a dangerous thread. The Service's First Desk, Diana Taverner, concocts a new scheme and soon clashes again with Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses. The tone blends dark comedy and violent reckoning.

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