Review: The List (Slough House, #2.5)
Gaby Meares
The List is the first in a series of novellas that run alongside the novels in the Slough House series. At 67 pages I’d call this a short story, not a novella, but who cares? The set-up is exquisite, and the dialogue whip-sharp, just as you’d expect from Herron. Plot twists abound.
John Bachelor is a milkman; in charge of retired assets (spooks), ‘his role was to make sure they suffered no unwelcome intrusions, no mysterious clicks on the landline; above all, that they weren’t developing a tendency to broadcast the details of their lives to anyone who cared to listen.’ When one of his charges, Dieter Hess dies (of natural causes), Bachelor discovers a coded list of names hidden in his apartment. And so the fun begins!
This may be a short, sharp read, but it’s still brimming with quotable quotes and brilliant analogies:
On a chest of drawers sat a hairbrush still clogged with old-man hair. Bachelor shuddered, as if something with a heavy tread had stomped across his future.
She [Catherine] had fallen far - there were those who’d argue she’d fallen further than Lamb - but the only enemy she’d made on the way was her own younger self.
Information is a tart - information is anybody’s. It reveals as much about those who impart it as it teaches those who hear. Because information, ever the slut, swings both ways. False information - if you know it’s false - tells you half as much again as the real thing, because it tells you what the other feller thinks you don’t know, while real information, the copper-bottomed truth, is worth its weight in fairy-dust. When you have a source of real information, you ought to forsake all others and snuggle down with it for good. Even though it’ll never work out, because information, first, last and always, is a tart.
Highly recommended.