Bad Actors

THE INSTANT #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*Now a major TV series starring Gary Oldman*'A pitch-perfect espionage thriller' Sunday TimesIn MI5 a scandal is brewing and there are bad actors everywhere.A key member of a Downing Street think-tank has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, one-time First Desk of MI5's Regent's Park, is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to Regent's Park HQ itself, with its chief, Diana Taverner, as prime suspect. Meanwhile her Russian counterpart has unexpectedly shown up in London but has slipped under MI5's radar.Over at Slough House, the home for demoted and embittered spies, the slow horses are doing what they do best: adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation.In a world where lying, cheating and backstabbing is the norm, bad actors are bending the rules for their own gain. If the slow horses want to change the script, they'll need to get their own act together before the final curtain.*Includes the short story Standing by the Wall: A Slough House Interlude*'The foremost living spy novelist in the English language' New Statesman'This is entertainment of the highest class' Literary Review'The man is a genius' The Spectator

Bad Actors took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement, Bad Actors is both thriller and anti-thriller: subverting and denying the treats you expect from the genre, but then providing them in a twisted form after all, Jackson Lamb is the greatest literary creation of this century . . . Herron is master of the metaphor and his extraordinarily well-plotted books are always centred on real-life events, An ingeniously structured caper, Satire at its best along with him being one of the best spy thriller writers around

Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, two CWA Daggers, been published in 20 languages, and are the basis of a major TV series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He is also the author of the Zoë Boehm series, and the standalone novels Reconstruction and This is What Happened. Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.