The Red Ribbon

A Financial Times thriller of the year

The thrilling follow up to The Irregular: A Different Class of Spy, featuring Wiggins - an ex-soldier who was trained as a child by Sherlock Holmes.

Praise for The Irregular

'H.B. Lyle has found the golden thread between Bond and Holmes' Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland

'Impressive period detail and sharp dialogue add charm to the strong plot' Daily Mail

'A thrilling story of espionage, murder and the creation of the Secret Service' Charles Cumming, author of A Colder War

Captain Vernon Kell's fledgling secret intelligence service is under pressure. It's meant to root out German spies and quell foreign threats, but with few results it faces closure.

Harassed by politicians, like the ambitious Winston Churchill, bullied by Special Branch, undermined by his colleague Cumming's ill-advised foreign ventures and alarmed at his wife's involvement with militant suffragettes, Kell is making no progress in tracking high-profile leaks from the government. To make matters worse, his only agent, Wiggins, would rather be working on cases of his own.

Wiggins grew up on the streets, one of the urchins trained in surveillance by Sherlock Holmes and known as the Baker Street Irregulars. He has promised to avenge the death of his best friend, and to track down a missing girl.

But when his search takes him towards a club in Belgravia - a club containing a lot of young women and presided over by the fearsome Big T, one of his former gang-mates - Wiggins is drawn into a conspiracy that will test both his personal and his professional resolve.

A satisfying, standalone sequel to The Irregular: A Different Class of Spy, H.B. Lyle's brilliantly entertaining spy story is also a superb evocation of London in 1910, from the finest drawing rooms to the meanest streets.