Real Tigers

4 1/2 stars. This is the third book in Herron's excellent Sough House novels. This is the place where disgraced MI5 spooks go to be out of sight, out of mind. But when one of the team is kidnapped, she is asked the name of someone she trusts with her life. That operative gets a text with the photo of her tied up and is tasked with doing something to save her life. This involves breaching security to get a top secret document. This is just the beginning of an adventure that will involve all of the team at Slough House in varying degrees to try to find the hostage and to take down the people responsible for taking her. This was quite a terrific read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I beliueve that every book in this terrific series is better than the one before it so I expect to have some more really great reads ahead of me, as I bought all the books in the series. Herron did a great job on this particular book. I love all the quirky characters. The ending of this one blew me away.

I am still a book or so behind the excellent Apple TV series. I thought this one, as a TV series was the best (of four) so far, and the book was better than the TV series. The characters continue to develop and entertain, the portrayals on TV well 'imprinted' while reading the story. A good read, and a flawed, but relatable plot - better than the TV series. I can see that the stories and plots might become a bit similar (the fourth TV series beginning to head that way, perhaps, but the plot and the dialogue in this book (number 3) keeps one fully entertained.

Another Slough House story

Real Tigers is the third book in Mick Herron's series about Jackson Lamb and the 'slow horses' - a team of MI5 agents who, due to character flaws or past mistakes, have been shunted off to Slough House, where they spend their days sifting through data and compiling pointless reports. Lamb himself is a Cold War veteran gone to seed whose shambling, slobbish exterior conceals a sharp, wily cunning and the previous books have seen him and his team become embroiled - with varying degrees of legitimacy - in operations that are as much about conflicts within the service itself as they are about national security.Real Tigers takes this to the next level. Kickstarting the action is the kidnap of Catherine Standish, a recovering alcoholic whose role is primarily that of Lamb's PA. Lamb's operation to free Catherine and tackle the kidnappers is heavily entangled with internal service politics, with Home Secretary Peter Judd - whose mop-haired, bumbling public school buffoon persona is a front for a vicious, power-hungry bully, if that helps you guess who he might be based on - playing a central role.Like the other books in the series, Real Tigers is full of complicated machinations and double-dealing - so much so that it's occasionally a little hard to keep track of who's on whose side - but it's really the characters and the dialogue between them that makes it such fun to read. Mick Herron writes dialogue that is sharp and witty, even laugh out loud funny at times, and some characters who were perhaps less three-dimensional in the earlier books being more fleshed out here. Socially inept hacker Roderick Ho, for example, has developed a mildly disturbing crush on Louisa Guy, who in turn is doing her best to deal with the death of her colleague and boyfriend Min Harper while slogging her way through work so dull that it doesn't even provide a distraction. There's more of a role here too for Marcus and Shirley, who were introduced in Dead Lions and both appear to have addictions about which they're greatly in denial.The plot builds to an action-packed and extremely fast-paced climax, although oddly, this was the one sequence that worked less well for me; it just felt too frenetic and a little too much. However, I do generally prefer mystery and detection to guns and fights, so someone more attuned to action thrillers than me would probably welcome this element of the story a lot more than I did.Overall, Real Tigers is another cracking read from Mick Herron, delivering exactly what readers of this series will want from Jackson Lamb. It comes to a pleasingly neat conclusion while also leaving plenty of scope for certain aspects of the story to return and be further developed in the next book in the series, Spook Street, which was published on 9 February.

Well written and great beginning of the series