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    Real Tigers
    Real Tigers
    Real Tigers
    Audiobook10 hours

    Real Tigers

    Written by Mick Herron

    Narrated by Gerard Doyle

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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. The “Slow Horses,” as the failed spies of Slough House are called, are
    doomed to spend the rest of their careers pushing paper, but they all want back in on the action.

    When one of their own is kidnapped and held for ransom, the agents of Slough House must defeat the odds, overturning all expectations of their competence, to breach the top-notch security of MI5’s intelligence headquarters, Regent’s Park,
    and steal valuable intel in exchange for their comrade’s safety. The kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg, however—the agents uncover a larger web of intrigue that involves not only a group of private mercenaries but the highest authorities
    in the Secret Service. After years spent as the lowest on the totem pole, the Slow Horses suddenly find themselves caught in the midst of a conspiracy that threatens not only the future of Slough House, but of MI5 itself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 19, 2016
    ISBN9781501904554
    Real Tigers

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    Reviews for Real Tigers

    4/5

    229 ratings17 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very well written, enjoyed the plot and the twists. The slow horses developed nicely.
    • 4/5
      All of the Slough House/Slow Horses series are excellent, and this is no exception, highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Very convoluted. Good but not as good as Dead Lions.
    • 4/5
      Loved the characters in this book. Complicated but understandable mystery. I just wish he would make the characters easier to follow. Three of them all began with the letter T: Tierney, Tavener, Traymor.
    • 5/5
      This review is repeated for all the books in the Slough House series:
      Slow Horses
      Dead Lions
      The List
      Real Tigers
      Spook Street
      London Rules

      I’m on holiday in Australia and like all good holidays I came with a pile of books. Also like all good holidays, the books are pure escapism writing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish it, missing a page or two will not spoil the plot, not remembering a word of it the next day? well that marks it as a really good holiday read.

      I devoured this series, one every two days and loved every minute of them all. haven’t found the last one yet but ave got all the ones that came before including the novella, The List. You could pick any one of them up and read it and it wouldn’t matter if you hadn’t read the preceding ones, they all work individually but just like soup, steak and syrup pudding they work best in the right order.

      The setting is a dingy, run down building in a dingy, run down part of London. It is called Slough House and the people in there are referred to as Slow Horses. They are all members of the Secret Service who have fucked up one way or another and are no longer suitable for active service, but cannot be sacked without falling foul of the Employment Act, yes it even applies to spies.

      So they are banished to Slough House and given menial, mind numbing repetitive, pointless, soul destroying, work to do until they eventually give up and leave. Except, some of them don’t leave. Everyone pretty much knows exactly how everyone else fucked up big time to be in Slough House except for their boss, one Jackson Lamb, no-one knows how he ended up here or even suspects that he bargained his place here in exchange for doing a nasty job that was necessary at the time. He could best be described as cunning, nasty, abrasive, insulting, crude, ill-mannered and very politically incorrect, except that he spent the majority of his time in the service behind the wall working undercover in Soviet, Cold War territory, something that very few came back from alive.

      The books are a series of events that befall the occupants of Slough House. You soon get a feel for the characters and the James Bond meets Coronation Street situation. But them some of them die and some of them don’t. From book to book you never know who will be around at the end of the book. The characters of Jackson Lamb had me laughing out loud on many occasions, making me realise how seldom this happens!

      The real enemies are seen mainly to be those within the Secret Service and their political masters and the ends they will go to secure what they see as their rightful place in history. Right and Wrong are easily mistaken for each other and beyond a certain point it depends where you stand as to what you call which. The guns are seldom in the right hands and the good guys quite often don’t make it.

      The incidental characters are easily seen for the current political muppets they are based upon, a particularly evil Boris Johnson is never far from the plot. Also current events, Brexit and so on. In discussing the seemingly unbelievable factors in the current case it only takes Jackson Lamb to point out that Tony Blair is now a Peace Envoy for everyone to grasp that nothing can be dismissed as highly unlikely.

      If this ever gets turned into a Netflix series I will buy a television just to watch it!
    • 4/5
      Excellent.
    • 5/5
      The third volume in Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series of thrillers continues to be as good as promised. Each of the books sees one or more members of his ‘slow horses’ team leave the team (sometimes because they are killed) while newcomers are introduced to replace them. And in each book, the team members — scorned by the official British intelligence services at ‘the Park’ — prove themselves to be rather good at what they do, especially fighting. This book has a rather nuanced look at the bad guys — who may turn out to be not so very bad at all, in some cases. Increasingly, at the heart of the books is an ambitious British Conservative politician named Peter Judd, who resembles the country’s current prime minister in a number of ways, including the description of his hairstyle and the fact that he rides a bicycle. It’s been reported that author Herron may well have known Boris Johnson in his university days, and if that’s the case, and the character is based on inside knowledge, that’s a terrifying prospect.
    • 5/5
      The most enjoyable of the series for me, so far.
    • 3/5
      isn't this a little overrated?
    • 4/5
      ‘Real Tigers’ is another winner in Mick Herron’s Slough House series. The writing is great, the dialogue witty, the storyline interestingly tricky, but if you’re looking for a leCarre style spy novel, this ain’t it! Slough House is a British Secret Service dumping ground for those agents who’ve really ‘effed up’. They’re known as the ‘slow horses’, and that’s not a good thing. Their leader, Jackson Lamb, is one of my favorite characters: fat, lazy, smelly, sloppy, but in possession of a quick wit, the sharpest of tongues, a legendary past career as an Ops guy, and knowledge of where the metaphorical bodies are buried. Slough House is viewed with derision by the entire rest of Brit intelligence but Lamb doesn’t care. It’s his team of screw ups and he knows exactly what they can and can’t do.Real Tigers begins with the kidnapping of Lamb’s assistant. It’s not a ‘real’ crime, just part of a ‘tiger’ operation by the Intelligence organization to test its internal responsiveness. Except it’s much more than that, with suddenly not only intra & interdepartmental warfare breaking out but also a 3rd party who’d been brought in to help with the Tiger operation going rogue for unknown reasons. Lamb and his slow horses are engaged to do some dirty work, not because of their expertise but because they’re ‘off the books’ and therefore insulating the higher ups in case something goes south. It does, no surprise there, but it all gets settled in the end with some violence and maximum backstabbing.Slough House is a great series, but it’s unlike anything else in the genre. There’s a lot of humor, but it’s not silly stuff. More like witty repartee among a bunch of self aware screwups and their fearless leader. They do serious work, sometimes not particularly well, but they certainly try hard. Lamb is the best buffer ever, which is definitely needed since his peers and the higher ups in Intelligence are a bunch of snakes. The strengths of the series are the excellent writing, the great characters, and the humor that’s woven through the serious situations the slow horses get themselves into. It’s great!
    • 4/5
      This series gets better and better: the twists and turns of the duplicitous MI5 and plotting apparatchiks. The black humour continues to flow and the Boris Johnson digs are entertaining."Taverner said, “This is not the sort of juggernaut you want to walk in front of, Jackson.”“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t forget, I have my team to consider.”“Really? That’ll be a first.”“They have a natural respect for me.”“That’s not respect. It’s Stockholm syndrome.”
    • 4/5
      Mick Herron’s series featuring the inimitable Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’ goes from strength to strength. Lamb himself is an extraordinary creation, reminiscent of Reginald Hill’s burly and crass Superintendent Andy Dalziel, only far more dishevelled and boorish. His ‘slow horses’ are cast-offs from the elite world of MI5, each having been consigned to the equivalent of intelligence Siberia following a spectacular failure. They are a mixed bunch: Catherine Standish, middle aged and alcoholic, battling to make it through each day without slipping off the wagon; River Cartwright, whose survival in the Service might owe much to his grandfather who was one of its legendary figures; Louisa Guy, still grieving the loss of her partner who died during a misconceived operation the previous year; and Roderick Ho, the team’s computer nerd who takes dysfunctional behaviour to a new level.This time around, the team finds itself under renewed pressure. Senior officials at the Service’s headquarters have lost patience with the slow horses, as has a politically ambitious Home Secretary. There are, however, greater dangers facing the slow horses, and these become evident when one of them is kidnapped and held hostage.Herron is adept at developing watertight plots which he then peoples with colourful characters. His dialogue is masterful, too, peppered with hilarious exchanges though never to the extent that they compromise the serious narrative thread. The overall effect is intensely entertaining.
    • 4/5
      In this novel, the third in the Slough House series, Catherine is kidnapped by an old drinking buddy and River tries to save her by accessing the Home Secretary's personal records. This is just the kicking off point, of course, but I did find it a bit odd that River would act as he did. While it is necessary for the plot, I would have expected him to have sought support, rather than acting alone. And maybe it was just me, but I couldn't work out how the Batman/Spiderman prologue fitted in; there was a page explaining how it was linked, but it made no sense to me. Anyway...Marcus and Shirley are much more the focus of this instalment and go a long way to proving that they do indeed deserve to be at Slough House. There was a lot of very entertaining humour as usual, a lot of it directed at Ho. While the plot was as twisty as usual, there was also a fair amount of action, perhaps too much really for my taste - I do prefer more intellectual intriguing. Perhaps slightly more of Catherine musing about alcohol than was strictly necessary too. The ending leaves open threads which cause me to hope there will be a next chapter to the series.
    • 4/5
      A generally entertaining spy thriller with a twist -- instead of a story about the best agents working for MI5 in England, it's a story about the agents who mess up their careers (perhaps before they even become a field agent) and end up in the misfit office called Slough House. Biggest problem is that the story starts VERY slowly, and if I had not read Mick Herron previously, I might have given up on the book. But once the action starts, Herron is quite adept at keeping the reader engaged until the end.
    • 4/5
      I chose to read Mick Herron’s “Real Tigers” because of the glowing reviews. I’m always in search of a literate new series, and who wouldn’t want to try a book that Publisher’s Weekly describes as “A superb thriller . . . Herron may be the most literate, and slyest, thriller writer in English today.”And, while my overall reaction isn’t glowing, it is favorable. I’ll probably go back and start with the first book in the series, which, on retrospection, I should have done in the first place. “Real Tigers” is Book 3 in the saga of the disgraced MI5 operatives of Slough House.While the novel is complex, I found it slow going at first. Reading the first third was a chore. Then the multiple plots began to be explored and in the last third, they came together in a much livelier manner.Even the black humor became more frequent and I found myself laughing aloud (in public no less) at Herron’s phrasing and clever thrusts.Mick Herron is indeed as talented as promised; the book is entertaining and sly once the reader becomes familiar with the terrain.(A reader's copy was provided by the publisher.)
    • 4/5
      Great addition to this series. Jackson Lamb continues to be an equal opportunity offender while his crew of banished agents get caught up in a violent squabble between power hungry higher-ups within MI5. The plot is layered & riddled with red herrings & misdirection. As usual, you find yourself laughing at the most inappropriate moments.
    • 5/5
      What a great deal of fun! I haven't read the earlier books in the series, but I will do so forthwith. Picked this up at ALA, wasn't expecting much, and now I've been happily surprised. I will definitely recommend this series to like-minded readers. I love a spy novel with a sense of humor.