A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Ah yes, and that I am doing, but unfortunately not enough e-copies at the library, so have ended up in the most recent book (Bad Actors). Mick Herron’s first Jackson Lamb novel, Slow Horses, was described as the ‘most enjoyable British spy novel in years’ by the Mail on Sunday and picked as one of the best twenty spy novels of all time by the Daily Telegraph.

In the dilapidated offices of Slough House, these files spooks spend their time on various pointless tasks, designed to break their will and bring about their resignations, avoiding the hassle, expense and bad publicity of employment tribunals. If a tiger leaves - say to get a drink - it will cover it's kill by raking leaves, dirt, grass and even rocks over the carcass. He is able to express himself so neatly and frequently presents the reader with epigrammatic comments .Herron won the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger for this novel, though for my money his debut is a better book. The Slough House series of which Real Tigers is the third instalment, is surely among the finest British spy fiction of the past 20 years.

Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc. This might explain his loyalty to his team when they are in peril, and makes his otherwise rude and bullying behaviour towards them forgivable.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. The story proper begins some time later when Catherine Standish is abducted one evening as she leaves work. Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. One of the first things to appreciate is that each novel is an underdog story – a group of individuals, under-qualified and under-resourced, who have to beat their better-off cousins at The Park to save the day.

in this series, Dead Lions and novella The List, I understood why the Mail on Sunday named it “finest new crime series this millennium”. Catherine Standish, one of their number, worked in Regent’s Park long enough to understand treachery, double-dealing and stabbing in the back, and she’s known Jackson Lamb long enough to have learned that old sins cast long shadows. Receiving a copy of Real Tigers for review purposes did not impact the expression of my honest opinions above. The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs.When one of their own is kidnapped, the washed-up MI5 operatives of Slough House—the Slow Horses, as they’re known—outwit rogue agents at the very highest levels of British Intelligence, and even to Downing Street itself. And she also knows that chance encounters never happen to spooks, even recovering drunks whose careers have crashed and burned. I certainly enjoyed all the little surprising plot twists along the way to the wickedly delightful conclusion. I’m not normally one for visual comedy, but Herron sets up some hilariously farcical scenes in this instalment. What better ingredients for a series than spies that have been placed on the scrap heap with career redemption on their minds and axes to grind?

Deliciously tongue-in-cheek and with a strikingly serpentine construction, it is a thriller that moves Herron close to the class of Graham Greene. It is still headed by the fearsome Jackson Lamb, an ex-Joe (street operative) who knows where all the bodies are buried – indeed, he put some of them there. Meanwhile, Claude Whelan, current First Desk, is caught between a weak PM and a populist MP flushed from a successful Brexit referendum. Machiavellian plotting, sly humour, characters so compromised but so well-drawn you won’t be sure if he wants them to win or lose, and topical satire – this time the thorny issue of extraordinary rendition. 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.These subspecies are the Bengal tiger, South China tiger, Indochinese tiger, Sumatran tiger and Amur tiger (also known as Siberian tiger).