The Twenty Seventh Book of 2026: Real Tigers, by Mick Herron

Started 8/26/26, Finished 8/28/26

The third book of the Slow Horses series, Real Tigers finds our favorite ne’er do well secret agents getting into trouble in their usual non-secret ways.

The story starts with Catherine Standish getting kidnapped. Catherine is the only non-spy among the denizens of Slough House. The former personal assitant to the head of MI5, a traitor she found dead in his bathtub years earlier, Catherine acts as a kind of office manager to the Slough House zoo. She’s also a recovering alcoholic who’s constantly dangling her feet over the edge of the wagon.

Her kidnapping is very civilized and seems orchestrated to force slow horse River Cartwright to try to do the right thing in all the wrong ways, breaking in to MI5 headquarters at Regents Park to obtain some information that’s no longer there. He’s caught, of course, because that’s how things go for River.

Things deteriorate, and complicate, from there. River gets beaten up, Catherine is tortured in a civilized and non-physical way. Politics, both office and national, mess up the scene. There’s a gunfight. At least in this story, no slow horses end up dead, though a couple are fired. Kinda.

The Slow Horses books tell their stories on three levels: the personal level for the slow horses and other characters, the office politics level as people try to move up various ladders or cling to the rungs they’re on, and the national political level as someone despicable tries to gain the highest office in the land. Not everyone is trying to better themselves, though. Some, like Catherine and Slough House’s rather disgusting head, Jackson Lamb, either appear happy where they are or are just trying to keep their heads above water.

But Lamb has an agenda of his own, and of course secrets of his own, and he’s not above using his low positiion and the misfits on his team to try to further it. This is a story that plays out over the whole series.

In additon to the main line of Slow Horses novels, author Mick Herron has also written several shorter works that fit into the timeline. These have all been published in Standing At The Wall. The short story The List precedes this novel. Though the connection between that story and Real Tigers appears to be minimal (it’s more obvious in the next book, Spook Street), I find Herron likes to plant things that sneak up on the reader from behind piles of boxes. It’s best to pay attention to everything!

Real Tigers was adapted by Apple TV in season three of the Slow Horses series.