Real tigers

The narrative line of Brit author Herron's latest spy thriller is set out easily enough. MI5 has a special circle of hell for spooks who've blown vital assignments. It's Slough House, where the losers push paper in jobs designed not just to bore but to kill the soul. The place even smells bad. But then a has-been woman is kidnapped, and another loser is told that to free her, he must steal a certain file. Of course, there are wheels within wheels, and readers familiar with the genre won't be surprised that VIPs are involved. It's Herron's gorgeous prose that calls for attention. He's been cultivating it through earlier novels and it's in full bloom here. Readers prepared to give the language time to work will be rewarded, and there's another payoff for their patience: an 80-page shootout that should please the most demanding action fan. As the villains learn, If you open enough doors, you'll eventually find a tiger. --Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2016 Booklist

The disgraced spies at MI5's Slough House must try to save one of their own in CWA Gold Dagger Award-winner Herron's outstanding third thriller featuring uncouth Jackson Lamb and crew (after 2013's Dead Lions). When one of these "slow horses," Catherine Standish, doesn't show up for work, her colleagues don't initially worry until they're contacted by kidnappers who say that they'll only guarantee Standish's return in exchange for information stored on a secret government computer, which happens to be in MI5's headquarters in London's Regent's Park. River Cartwright, the hero of 2010's Slow Horses, tries to infiltrate the main office, not an easy task, especially since the agency ripples with internal strife as the new home secretary, Peter Judd, butts heads with the Intelligence Service chief, Dame Ingrid Tearney. Soon the lines between spies, slow horses, and private mercenaries blur dangerously. Herron expertly juggles multiple plot lines and fully formed characters, injecting everything with a jolt of black humor. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.) (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

As fans will know, Slough House is the back-of-beyond home of British spies who are drunks, addicts, failures, and misfits. This series recounts the tales of their redemption. Perhaps unusual among crime writers (though Donald Westlake comes to mind), Herron couches his intensely complicated plot in pillows of humor that hit the full range from bodily functions to double entendres. At heart, there is solid seriousness here as the new Home Secretary unleashes a tiger team (in which your own side tests you to the limit) to expose the weaknesses of British intelligence. The team kidnaps one of the Slough deadbeats and the others are tricked into a rescue operation. -VERDICT Readers love this series for its breezy treatment of espionage in which you get to cheer for the underdogs while also showing respect for their opponents. Characters are drawn with the sharpest possible pen and, like them or not, they are compelling whether alone or in groups. Herron already earned a 2013 CWA Gold Dagger Award for the previous title Dead Lions and was short listed for the 2015 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Nobody Walks.-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The abduction of one of their own rouses the members of MI5's dead-end Slough House (Dead Lions 2013, etc.) to action once more. As she's the first to tell everyone, recovering alcoholic Catherine Standish has never been "a joe," a field agent. She's just the assistant to Jackson Lamb, who lords it over Slough House as if it weren't the penultimate stop on the path from success in the Security Service to disgrace and oblivion. But that doesn't stop her ex-lover Sean Donovan from scooping her up in a van, locking her in a room an hour outside London, and demanding for her return a copy of a most sensitive intelligence file. Naturally, River Cartwright, the colleague Catherine designates as the one she'd be most likely to trust with her life, makes a hash of his attempt to meet the ransom demand and ends up in a little room of his own being worked over by Nick Duffy of the Dogs, the service's internal police. That's no slur against him, though, because the savviest agent in the world (something River's never come close to being on his best day) would never have suspected the truth about the rabbit hole Catherine's tumbled down. Her kidnapping, it's gradually revealed, is both more and less than it seemsless, because her abductors couldn't be more considerate, except for the one who quickly gets killed; more, because the service itself is so torn between narcissistic careerists and warring factions battling for control that its fate, and presumably that of her majesty's government, seems to hang in the balance. Even readers who don't care for the endless bureaucratic infighting will have to admire this tour de force, in which virtually every single playergood guys, bad guys, all the turncoats and in-betweenersis somehow connected to British Intelligence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The narrative line of Brit author Herron's latest spy thriller is set out easily enough. MI5 has a special circle of hell for spooks who've blown vital assignments. It's Slough House, where the losers push paper in jobs designed "not just to bore but to kill the soul." The place even smells bad. But then a has-been woman is kidnapped, and another loser is told that to free her, he must steal a certain file. Of course, there are wheels within wheels, and readers familiar with the genre won't be surprised that VIPs are involved. It's Herron's gorgeous prose that calls for attention. He's been cultivating it through earlier novels and it's in full bloom here. Readers prepared to give the language time to work will be rewarded, and there's another payoff for their patience: an 80-page shootout that should please the most demanding action fan. As the villains learn, "If you open enough doors, you'll eventually find a tiger." Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

As fans will know, Slough House is the back-of-beyond home of British spies who are drunks, addicts, failures, and misfits. This series recounts the tales of their redemption. Perhaps unusual among crime writers (though Donald Westlake comes to mind), Herron couches his intensely complicated plot in pillows of humor that hit the full range from bodily functions to double entendres. At heart, there is solid seriousness here as the new Home Secretary unleashes a tiger team (in which your own side tests you to the limit) to expose the weaknesses of British intelligence. The team kidnaps one of the Slough deadbeats and the others are tricked into a rescue operation. VERDICT Readers love this series for its breezy treatment of espionage in which you get to cheer for the underdogs while also showing respect for their opponents. Characters are drawn with the sharpest possible pen and, like them or not, they are compelling whether alone or in groups. Herron already earned a 2013 CWA Gold Dagger Award for the previous title Dead Lions and was short listed for the 2015 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Nobody Walks.—Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

The disgraced spies at MI5's Slough House must try to save one of their own in CWA Gold Dagger Award–winner Herron's outstanding third thriller featuring uncouth Jackson Lamb and crew (after 2013's Dead Lions). When one of these "slow horses," Catherine Standish, doesn't show up for work, her colleagues don't initially worry until they're contacted by kidnappers who say that they'll only guarantee Standish's return in exchange for information stored on a secret government computer, which happens to be in MI5's headquarters in London's Regent's Park. River Cartwright, the hero of 2010's Slow Horses, tries to infiltrate the main office, not an easy task, especially since the agency ripples with internal strife as the new home secretary, Peter Judd, butts heads with the Intelligence Service chief, Dame Ingrid Tearney. Soon the lines between spies, slow horses, and private mercenaries blur dangerously. Herron expertly juggles multiple plot lines and fully formed characters, injecting everything with a jolt of black humor. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.) (Jan.)