His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Real Tigers begins with fan favorite “slow horse,” Catherine Standish, literally bumping into past colleague Sean Donovan outside the Slough House building. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added. Virtually every page of this gripping novel merges tense moments with Herron’s wicked sense of humor, causing the reader to laugh-out-loud even as their knuckles turn white.

Real Tigers – A BOLO Books Surveillance Review Real Tigers – A BOLO Books Surveillance Review

It also lays the ground for the events of Joe Country, and at the same time introduces a series villain, ex-CIA operative Frank Harkness. But now, one of their number has been kidnapped, and the ransom involves access to classified files. In action thrillers like this, the protagonist can be as unconventional as the author likes, which means this is an area where the genre is free to grow and develop. Even readers who don’t care for the endless bureaucratic infighting will have to admire this tour de force, in which virtually every single player—good guys, bad guys, all the turncoats and in-betweeners—is somehow connected to British Intelligence. The characters are all credibly flawed, their dialogue is full of understated dry wit, and there is plenty of humour, most of it very black and very British, with an abundance of laugh out loud moments.Herron has a natural talent for creating and portraying characters that are instantly understandable, relatable, and more than occasionally despicable. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc. flaws, but his ability to elicit a familial bond amongst his rag-tag collection of employees is not one of them. London: Slough House is the MI5 branch where disgraced operatives are reassigned after they’ve messed up too badly to be trusted with real intelligence work. She used to assist Charles Partner, who was First Desk at Regents Park until his suicide – something it’s rumoured Lamb might have had a hand in arranging.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron: 9781616957988

Everyone enjoys an underdog story of course, but on top of that, the novels are about friendships forged from the common bond of disappointment but tested in life-and-death situations. The current staff of seven “slow horses” occupy their time with tasks like comparing census results for anomalies, or checking passports issued during the ’81 Civil Service strike. At times darkly hilarious, at others gripping and intense, this confirms Herron and his series as a future classic.Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U. The story proper begins some time later when Catherine Standish is abducted one evening as she leaves work. Satire, verbal sparring and gunfights are deftly combined in a excellently written novel permeated by Herron’s sly, dry and very English sense of humour—rather as if Philip Larkin or Alan Bennett had had a go at spy fiction. It landed with a splash, readers taken with the author’s ingenious double locked-room murder mystery, which played well on one of the oldest formats in the genre. Describes a book or dust jacket that does show some signs of wear on either the binding, dust jacket or pages.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron | Hachette UK Real Tigers by Mick Herron | Hachette UK

Slough House, that “administrative oubliette” of the intelligence service, is a repository for inconvenient or incompetent spooks: the spies who have caused embarrassment by losing a gun runner on surveillance, have anger management issues, or managed to close down Kings Cross Station in a training exercise.

The action set-pieces in Real Tigers are skillfully rendered without the action genres tendency to stretch them out unnecessarily. She's worked in the Intelligence Service long enough to understand treachery, double-dealing and stabbing in the back.