Joe Country

Joe Country, the sixth installment in Mick Herron's Slough House series, follows the misfit operatives of MI5's dumping ground as they confront a teenage blackmailer's crisis, a rogue American mercenary's lethal agenda, and the intelligence establishment's willingness to sacrifice its own.

The novel opens with two unnamed men burning a barn in rural Wales, destroying evidence of violence inside. One dismisses the victims as rejects from Slough House, whose operatives are known as "slow horses," and declares them dead.

Slough House is a decrepit office building on Aldersgate Street in London, home to disgraced MI5 agents exiled from Regent's Park, the Service's headquarters. They are supervised by Jackson Lamb, a grotesque, foul-mouthed former field operative who presides over their pointless busywork with contempt. His PA, Catherine Standish, is a recovering alcoholic shaken by the revelation that Lamb killed her former boss, Charles Partner, years ago. Louisa Guy mourns Min Harper, a fellow slow horse and former lover who was killed previously. River Cartwright is the grandson of legendary spymaster David Cartwright, known as the O.B. (Old Bastard). Other slow horses include Roderick Ho, a socially oblivious but gifted IT specialist; Shirley Dander, a volatile agent; and J.K. Coe, a traumatized, near-silent operative who has killed before. The newest arrival, Lech Wicinski, is a Polish-heritage analyst banished after child pornography was found on his Service laptop, a charge he insists is false.

River sits at the bedside of his dying grandfather at a nursing home. The O.B. dies quietly while River dozes. River's family history shadows the loss: his mother, Isobel, was seduced years earlier by Frank Harkness, a renegade American spy who used their relationship to manipulate David Cartwright.

A phone call reaches Slough House on the desk of the dead Min Harper. Louisa answers and speaks to Clare Addison, Min's ex-wife, whose seventeen-year-old son Lucas has been missing for three days. Lucas withdrew several hundred pounds, packed a rucksack, and left his phone behind. Clare asks Louisa for help.

At Regent's Park, Diana Taverner has been installed as First Desk, head of the intelligence service. She forces out Emma Flyte, head of the Dogs (MI5's internal security division), who refuses a demeaning reassignment and resigns.

At David Cartwright's funeral, River spots Frank Harkness watching from the graveyard's edge and chases his estranged father around the chapel. Frank disables a guard, reaches his car, and escapes. Lamb convenes the slow horses to track Harkness. Ho captures the hire car's licence plate from traffic cameras; Coe runs facial recognition on ferry footage and identifies Harkness alongside three mercenaries: Anton Moser, Lars Becker, and Cyril Dupont.

Louisa investigates Lucas's disappearance separately, tracing his browsing history to Paul's Pantry, a catering firm in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and Caerwyss Hall, a nearby corporate retreat. She enlists the unemployed Emma to charm Ho into tracing Lucas's Fitbit, a GPS-enabled fitness tracker, which points to Pegsea, Pembrokeshire. Louisa takes leave and drives to Wales.

Taverner learns the full picture from Peter Judd, a disgraced former Home Secretary now running a PR firm. Judd arranged a New Year's event at Caerwyss Hall for an arms-dealing client; among the guests was a senior royal. Lucas, working as a caterer, watched the drunken guests strap a young woman to a crossbow target. The royal fired a bolt that sliced flesh from her arm. Lucas attempted to extort fifty thousand pounds for his silence. Judd referred the problem to the arms-dealing client, who hired Harkness to eliminate the boy.

At the crossroads where Lucas arranged the handover, Harkness's men reveal they have no intention of paying. Louisa intervenes from a ditch, pulling Lucas clear and striking a mercenary with a monkey wrench. She escapes with Lucas and sends a coded distress signal from a civilian mobile. Taverner recognizes the signal when it reaches the Hub, the Service's central monitoring floor, but deliberately suppresses it, calculating that letting the slow horses handle the situation, or fail, will justify sweeping reform under her control.

Emma independently travels to Wales when Louisa fails to check in, locating the cottage where Louisa and Lucas are hiding. She arrives as one of Harkness's men closes in. Emma holds the door while Louisa and Lucas flee over the garden wall. The three fugitives shelter overnight in a storage shed along the estuary.

In London, Wicinski's life disintegrates. Richard Pynne, his former line manager, tips off Wicinski's fiancée Sara about the allegation, and Sara throws him out. An unknown assailant attacks Wicinski at Slough House and carves the word PAEDO into his cheeks with a razor. The novel reveals who framed him: Pynne runs a double agent named Hannah Weiss, supposedly spying on the BND (German intelligence) for Britain, but Hannah is actually a triple agent controlled by Martin Kreutzmer, a veteran BND operative. When Wicinski ran Kreutzmer's cover name through Service databases, Kreutzmer had pornography planted on his laptop to destroy his credibility.

Alarmed by Louisa's silence, River mobilizes Shirley and Coe. Lamb connects the dots: Harkness tapped Clare's phone, tracked Louisa to Wales, and is hunting Lucas. Lamb gives River a gun, and the three set off. After a snow-blocked journey, they find Louisa's car with slashed tires and split up to search the countryside.

The violence escalates. Harkness's team arms themselves with handguns. Emma, wearing Louisa's white ski jacket after the women swapped coats, encounters Lars on a wooded track. He demands Lucas's location; when his phone rings, Emma attacks but Lars shoots and kills her. At a barn, Coe finds the concussed Cyril Dupont; both reach for weapons, and both die in the exchange: Coe slits Cyril's throat but is fatally stabbed. On the coastal path, River confronts Harkness, who tries to recruit him. They grapple at the cliff edge, and Harkness falls, though River sees no body.

Lucas panics after seeing Emma's body and hot-wires a car, crashing it through a shop window. Harkness reappears, limping and missing part of his ear. Louisa, wearing Emma's dark coat, taps the breast pocket, bluffing Harkness into believing she is armed. He stares at her, nods, and walks away.

River calls Lamb: Coe and Emma are dead, Harkness escaped, Louisa and Lucas are alive.

Lamb also settles deeper accounts. He tells Catherine the truth behind Partner's killing: As Partner's joe, or subordinate field operative, Lamb accidentally revealed the gender of a female East German asset. Partner sold the information, and three women were killed. David Cartwright then fed Partner disinformation, targeting a rising Russian official who was destroyed by suspicion, but his replacement was Vladimir Putin. Lamb killed Partner afterward. Catherine, who has been stockpiling hundreds of wine bottles in an elaborate flirtation with relapse, empties every one and pours them away.

Lamb tracks Kreutzmer through Molly Doran, the Park's data archivist, and confronts him at a London restaurant, where Kreutzmer suffers a minor stroke during the conversation. Lamb exploits his vulnerability, threatening to expose the unauthorized operation unless Kreutzmer contacts Anton Moser and offers BND reinstatement in exchange for killing Harkness. A newspaper report from Poitiers soon records a body with a bullet wound to the head. Lamb then burns Kreutzmer's network by informing Taverner about Hannah Weiss.

Wicinski uses a cut-throat razor Lamb has lent him, not to harm himself, but to cross-hatch fresh cuts over the carved letters on his cheeks, obliterating the word. Taverner meets Judd again; he pitches private-sector funding for the intelligence services, granting operational autonomy without government knowledge. She dismisses the idea but does not reject it.

In the final pages, Slough House absorbs its losses. River stares at Coe's empty desk. Shirley replays Lamb's old warning about keeping their heads down. Then Ho discovers that every Slough House operative, past and present, has been erased from Regent's Park's database. Their files and histories no longer exist. Ho rushes to Lamb's office. The slow horses crowd the landing, grasping the implications. Lamb, sitting motionless in the dark, says nothing. The story continues in Slough House.