Flamingo

by John Gardner

product_description

Genres: Thriller, Fiction, Modern

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Before coming an author of fiction in the early 1960s, John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer and a journalist. In all, Gardner has fifty-four novels to his credit, including Maestro, which was the New York Times book of the year. He was also invited by Ian Fleming’s literary copyright holders to write a series of continuation James Bond novels, which proved to be so successful that instead of the contracted three books he went on to publish some fourteen titles, including Licence Renewed and Icebreaker.

Having lived in the Republic of Ireland, the United States and the UK, John Gardner sadly died in August of 2007 having just completed his third novel in the Moriarty trilogy, Conan Doyle’s eponymous villain of the Sherlock Holmes series.

Reviews

[Jude · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this thinking it would be a neat historical reflection of 1930’s Shanghai, but instead it’s full of weird fetishization of Asian women, plenty of stereotypical portrayals of several different races, which of course add nothing to the plot at all, and macho male self-insert cliches. On top of all that, was very boring. Did not finish.

[Pers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, but I couldn't help feeling it was trying to hard to be James Bond (which the author also wrote).