HERRON, Mick. London Rules. London: John Murray. 2018.
8vo. Original black cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in the dustwrapper; pp. [6], 345, [1]. Signed without dedication in blue ink to the title page; a bright, crisp copy, the cloth and silver lettering sharp, the pages unmarked; in the unclipped dustwrapper (priced £16.99 to the front flap); a fine copy.
A fine, signed first edition, first printing of the fifth Slough House thriller.
London Rules is the fifth in the author's Slough House series of thrillers, featuring the memorable (and unexpectedly charismatic) character, Jackson Lamb, who Mark Lawson, in his Guardian review of the novel, describes as a "subversion" of Le Carré's George Smiley, the latter the "the humane genius of the British secret service, his worst vice being reading German poetry in the original", while Lamb is, on the face of it, "a bigoted, philistine, morbidly obese, spectacularly flatulent, alcoholic chain-smoker".
London Rules is another characteristically up to the minute Herron thriller, involving a beleaguered Prime Minister, Brexit, tabloid journalism and a string of terror attacks. The Slough House books have recently adapted for a highly acclaimed television series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb.
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