Under the guidance of his mentor, Giles Oakley, Bell secretly records a conversation between Quinn, Crispin, and an intelligence liaison code named "Paul" about a planned covert operation codenamed Wildlife.

Without Bell's knowledge, Wildlife takes place in Gibraltar, where a company of British Special Forces under the command of a man named Jeb are tasked with helping an Ethical Outcomes team of American mercenaries with extracting a high-ranking jihadist arms dealer allegedly squatting in an abandoned vacation home.

Now homeless and living in his van, Jeb informs Paul that, contrary to what he was told, the intelligence was faulty and the "jihadist" was, in fact, a refugee woman hiding with her infant daughter, both of whom were shot to death after a premature call to open fire.

In the aftermath, their bodies were quietly disposed of and Quinn blamed for the operation's failure, with no attempts made to identify the victims and no responsibility accepted by either the American or British governments.

The anonymous reviewer believes that le Carré "tells a great story in sterling prose, but he veers dangerously close to farce and caricature, particularly with the comically amoral Americans.

"[3] Kirkus Reviews notes that le Carré "resolutely keeping potential action sequences just offstage," and "focuses instead on the moral rot and creeping terror barely concealed by the affable old-boy blather that marks the pillars of the intelligence community.

"[4] Bill Ott, writing for Booklist, believes "Le Carré further establishes himself as a master of a new, shockingly realistic kind of noir in which right-thinking individuals who challenge the institutional order of things always lose.

"[5] The Guardian calls it a "thriller that resonates with Whitehall secrecy during the Bush-Blair era", and praises its depiction of how "the last decade in US and UK relations has been dominated by conflicts justified through secret intelligence that proved to be false.

Every speaker has a specified accent and there is an acute ear for other verbal tells, from the casual profanity of younger characters, regardless of class, to the fact that Bell knows that he has been frozen out when the minister stops calling him "Tobe" and reverts to "Toby".