A cynical British agent with a working-class background is sent to secure the release of a kidnapped scientist. The trail leads through a shabby London of bureaucracy and betrayal to a conspiracy inside his own service. He narrates the case with dry humour and growing distrust.
A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with bullet wounds and no memory. Clues point to a life as a professional assassin, and both the CIA and a killer called Carlos are hunting him. To survive, he must reconstruct who he was before he is caught.
Dominika Egorova, a Russian intelligence officer trained to seduce targets, is ordered to work against a CIA agent, Nathaniel Nash. As their operations and their feelings become entangled, both sides begin to suspect that someone is betraying the other.
A burnt-out British agent is sent to East Germany for one last operation: discredit a rival intelligence chief. In a world where loyalty is a currency and every contact may be selling you out, the mission turns into a trap with no safe exit.
James Bond is sent to a French casino to bankrupt Le Chiffre, a Soviet-backed paymaster, at the baccarat table. When the operation ends in torture and violence, he is sent away to recover with a woman he begins to trust, unaware that the game is not over.
After a mission fails, George Smiley is quietly brought back to find a Soviet mole inside British intelligence. Working from old files and a few wary colleagues, he sifts the careers of his former friends to discover which of them is the traitor.
Insomniac and alienated, a nameless narrator meets a charismatic soap salesman named Tyler Durden and helps found an underground fight club that grows into something far larger. As the club spreads, the narrator's life and sense of self begin to come apart.
Moist von Lipwig is a con man offered a choice: be hanged, or revive Ankh-Morpork's ruined post office. With the city's mail piled up undelivered in the crumbling post office and a rival message company sabotaging him, he sets out to make the letters move and stay ahead of his own past.
In late-Victorian London, a shopkeeper who is also a paid spy for a foreign power is ordered to carry out a bombing. The people around him, including his wife and her vulnerable brother, are pulled into the consequences of a plot he cannot control.
Three mothers at a coastal school become friends while a death at a school event draws nearer. Their polished lives hide abusive marriages, old grudges and rumour, and the night of the fundraiser forces the truth into the open.
Patrick Bateman is a wealthy Wall Street banker with a taste for designer labels, fine dining and status, and a private life of extreme violence. His narration moves between expensive restaurants and scenes of cruelty, refusing to say how much of either is real.
A British weather station on an Arctic ice floe sends a distress call after a fire. A US nuclear submarine is sent to rescue the survivors, but the narrator, a doctor with unclear orders, finds that the station was also a listening post and that someone aboard is lying.
A box of poisoned chocolates kills a man at his club, and the police can find no culprit. Six members of the Crimes Circle, an armchair detective society, each offer a different solution to the same murder, until amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham tests their theories against the facts.
A British wireless operator and a pilot become close friends before a mission goes wrong over occupied France. Captured by the Gestapo, the operator is forced to write down what she knows, and her account of the two women slowly reveals more than it first seems.
In 1947, pregnant and unmarried Charlie follows a lead about her missing cousin to a ruined woman in London. Their search draws on the story of Eve, a spy who ran a network in occupied France during the First World War, and the betrayals that broke it.
Six women who each survived a famous mass murder meet in a therapist's group to cope with the aftermath. When one of them is killed, the group's most guarded member goes on the run to learn who is hunting them and why their old cases keep being reopened.
Keiko has worked at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years and is content there, until the people around her begin pressuring her to want a normal life. Deadpan and sharp, the novel follows her attempt to perform the life others expect, by staging a relationship she does not want.
A disgraced financial journalist is hired by an old industrialist to solve the decades-old disappearance of his niece. His researcher is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, guarded hacker with her own scores to settle.
Doctor Impossible, a supervillain with a genius intellect and a long record of failed world-conquest plots, escapes prison and tries again. Half of the story is his own account; the other follows Fatale, a cyborg new to a superhero team, as the heroes try to stop him and uncover what happened to their missing leader.
Rachel rides the same commuter train every day and invents stories about a couple she sees from the window, until she learns the woman has vanished. Her memory of the night in question is full of gaps, and she cannot tell how much of what she believes is real.
A woman wakes in a London park with no memory, surrounded by bodies, holding a letter from her former self. It explains that she is an officer in a secret agency guarding Britain from supernatural threats. To find the traitor who tried to kill her, she must live a stranger's life.
Michael Smith has not spoken since a violent event in his childhood. As a teenager he discovers he can open almost any lock, a talent that draws criminals who need a safecracker. His skill also brings him to Amelia, and protecting her pulls him into an elaborate con he cannot easily escape.
Fifteen-year-old Christopher discovers the neighbour's dog stabbed to death and sets out to solve the mystery in the style of his favourite detective stories. His investigation uncovers hidden truths about his own family and forces him into a world he finds overwhelming.
Bombardier Yossarian wants to survive the war and go home, but every attempt to be grounded runs into a rule that answers itself: to be excused he must ask, and asking proves he is sane. Around him, officers profit and comrades die.
Start with “The Ipcress File”, “The Bourne Identity”, “Red Sparrow”: they are the closest to “Slow Horses” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Slow Horses” these are Spy Thriller, Satire, Morally Grey Character), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Red Sparrow”, “Going Postal”, “Big Little Lies”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
