Review of REAL TIGERS
the book that will be the next "Slow Horses" series ... tv versus book?
Mike Heron writes a lot of books and that always makes me uneasy. On one side of the profligate writer is Anthony Trollope and Joyce Carrol Oates but on the other is James Patterson (who, apparently, now only writes the outlines) and the new terror of the bestseller lists, Colleen Hoover. The latter (label as you will) far outnumber the former which basically makes my case. Nonetheless, I miss the John D. MacDonalds and Alistair MacLeans of my youth and have tried to return home many times only to be reminded that …
One night at dinner I was going on about the virtues of the HBO series, “Slow Horses”, when a reader I admire interrupted me and said I must first read the books written by Mike Heron that the series was based on. I almost didn’t bother after looking at an entire shelf in our local bookstore filled with his different series – another bug-a-bear … the writer with multiple series. Yet, I figured which book was next on HBO’s hit list, Real Tigers, took it to Mexico and read it in two days. Loved it. Great beach read by a very good writer where I laughed out loud and stayed up late to finish. The dialogue is funnier than in the series but, oddly, if Real Tigers is an accurate sampling, HBO’s “Slow Horses” feels a lot fresher than the books the series is based on. I may read another on a long plane flight; however, I would not be surprised if I didn’t. The formulaic gift required to write SOOO many of the books (and multiple series!) begins to ooze through the surface of the page and I then start to question if this is the best use of my reading time, laughs and all. When I was young, life had no horizon and Travis Magee in MacDonald’s bubble gum books never tried my then immortal reading soul. Oh well … another double-edged sword of age.
Real Tigers
Mike Herron
2017 400 pages