Death Is Forever

John Gardner's Bond #12

by John Gardner

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Fiction, Espionage, Thriller, Action, Audiobook, Mystery, Mystery Thriller

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Thomas Stroemquist]

No. Enough is enough - even if you’re for some reason entitled to put the ‘James Bond’ stamp on it.

I think Gardner hit it off once or twice, but more often than that, the results were as poor and awkward as this. I’m throwing in the towel, wondering what to do with the rest of the series. Actually, I didn’t collect them all, so it’s just a few paperbacks remaining... This one I know I read before, but can’t remember any of it. That of course tells a story in itself. All the chapter titles have “Death” in them, but for the last, which is called “R.I.P”.

Unfortunately, the wit, as well as the ideas stop there - and if you thought Fleming a chauvinist, stay far away from this hot mess! I’ll try Benson next, Gardner’s out in my book.

[Carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

DEATH IS FOREVER.... good title, effective story with just enough twists. I continue to marvel at the research and details Gardner employs in his 007 novels and - from that vantage point - this is one of his better works. The characters are more engaging and I actually found myself tied up in the Cabal organization, figuring out who was working on the side of good and which had been turned. The villain is believable and even when he follows the deathly trap of other Bond villains of telling Bond a bit too much of his wily plot, it works out and leads to a phenomenal climax.

This Gardner book could make for a great movie.

Nevertheless, as is a habit of Gardner's last few Bond novels, there are some unforgivable sins. For starters, James Bond has loved 2 - maybe 3 - women: Vesper, Tracy, and possibly Kissy in his amnesiac state. That said, why does he keep falling in love in these books? Why does he cry? Why does his voice crack? The reason we go along with the implausibility of James Bond's luck and the predictability of some of these stories (we know who will die to set up the ending, we know it's not over 'til it's over) is because James Bond is the coolest son of a bitch on the planet. He shows apathy in the face of utter despair. It's why he can spout out "The bitch is dead" after Vesper commits suicide in CASINO ROYALE. It's why he barely misses a beat going after Blofeld after Tracy is murdered. It's why he leaves a life with Kissy as soon as he realizes who he is again. He's James Bond.

This Bond actually uses the word, "fart" in DEATH IS FOREVER.... who are you???

And if you've ever wondered if James Bond uses condoms, unfortunately you find out in this book.

I get it - it was the 90's, AIDS was raging but - frankly - I escape into these stories. I need James Bond to be the unflappable hero only occasionally harkening back in his nightmares to his lost Tracy and the death and destruction of the last 40 years of adventures.

Sometimes, I really recognize the James Bond I know. Sometimes, I think Gardner loses him. I continue to be baffled by why everything has to be related to "the American" this and that... he's a British agent. Who gives a damn what the American version of something is in these stories? Sure, I'm American, but I want my British Secret Service agent, Captain James Bond, 007 - the cruel mouth, the comma of hair, the man every man wants to be and that every woman wants. I pray he returns in the next adventure.

I'd rank this 8th of the 12 Gardner's thus far. 3 1/2 stars.

[Marco Conelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ouch! Yes I threw in the towel, 30 pages before the end. Have you ever read a book and you just didn't care how it resolves. I have paid John Gardner a lot of compliments in the past as I realize he was taking up the 007 mantle and seemed to be on a one a year contract. The book gets started with a lot of double agents, deep covers, and confusing characters (who's really who they say they are) and I thought that was the good part of the book. In the end (and the middle for that part) I just don't think that this is James Bond, one of my favorite literary characters. It appears to be someone else's character and I just don't recognize him.

[John Yelverton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regardless where you fall, it's been universally acknowledged for good or ill that there is a disparity between the James Bond novels and the James Bond movies. This is the first James Bond novel that I have ever read that felt like it was the novelization of a James Bond movie.

[J.J. Lair · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second decade of writing this series came with subtle changes. Bond is more the cinema-smirking smart guy. Big Hans and little Hans for example of his wittiness. Bond is pushy with Easy. The name Easy. There are nods to the past. A discussion of looks between Sean Connery and Hoagy Carmichael. From the Gardner era, Q’ute is back. He communicates a lot with M. Foods from around Europe.
I should have seen the murder happen about two thirds of the book coming, but that surprised me.
Over the course of the Fleming books, Bond ages and becomes disgruntled. This book Bond is cinema-like in that he is becoming a superhero. There are traps and double crosses, Bond misses things, but over these twelve books, James Bond is James Bond. The railroad felt like that’s it? But wait a better end comes.
High marks for the Bond universe of characters and tropes. A lower point for another episode of Bond.

[Clem · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last time I reviewed one of the John Gardner/James Bond books, I notated that I needed to take a break from the series. Truth be told, these books aren’t really meant to be literary classics, nor or they meant to rival anything on a current best seller list. For about 15 years, author John Gardner seemed to methodically churn out a story based on the most popular spy in popular culture ever - 007. Although most argue his books are good, they will also argue that this author is no match for the superhero’s “father”, the late great Ian Fleming. But Fleming had now been dead for almost 30 years when this story was written, and I’ve always maintained that if Fleming were still alive, his style of writing that made him one of the greats a half a century ago, simply wouldn’t hold the same appeal for modern audiences.

But plod along John Gardner does, and this particular piece of work is one of his better ones. I purposely made myself slow down a bit, and made sure that I read the story in digestible chunks as to not rush through, and for this I’m glad. Some of Gardner’s books have been a bit too outlandish with colorful villains and cavernous mansions etc. Whereas that may be acceptable for some of the films, the books tend to be more favorable with a more straight-forward, linear plot. I also imagine that it became a bit harder for spy writers once the cold war was officially over in the early to mid-nineties. Many of the sources for traditional bad guys were no longer from acrimonious countries. Who could be the big bad villains now that the Russians and East Germans were all of the sudden good guys?

Well, the villain is an ex-East German baddie - named Wolfgang Weisen, or “The Poison Dwarf”. Even though we’re all now on the same side, the dwarf wants revenge and so members of an elite, good guy, clandestine service called “The Cabal” start being picked off one by one. James Bond is called in and.....well, you know the rest.

About the only thing I didn’t care for was the Bond Girl. Her name is Eazy (short for Elizabeth), and the problem is that Bond Girls are either highly disposable (meaning they’re there at the end with our hero in some climactic love scene and then gone forever), or James Bond literally falls in love with his lady - which means she has to somehow die (think Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or Vesper in Casino Royale). This one, Gardner wants it to be the latter (i.e. we’ll kill her off because Bond is falling for her), but there is absolutely no chemistry between the two that would differentiate her from many of Bond’s flights of fancy. When we’re “told” that Bond is starting to have strong feelings for her, but not allowed to actually see nor feel anything developing between the two, we almost know for sure about the tragedy that will unfold.

Overall, though, this one was pretty good. I have two more John Gardner's to go before I can start on the Raymond Benson Bond novels (I already have them, and they’re constantly staring at me from the bookshelf - almost imploring me to hurry up and finish the Gardner books so I can pick them up). As tempting as the newer Benson novels are, I will still do everything in my power to not rush through the last two Gardner books, and try to enjoy them. I’m hoping they resemble this one.

[Dustin Dye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Death Is Forever is a middling James Bond book, somewhat better than Gardner's other novels in the series. Gardner is going for a more realistic tone here than Fleming, which is more of a detriment, as it lacks the flamboyancy of Fleming's books, without enabling the reader to suspend disbelief.

This time around, Bond is joined by a CIA desk jockey, Easy St. John, to get to the bottom of the one-by-one elimination of the members of a defunct spy ring. Gardner tries to evoke Cold War-era feel, knowingly depicting anachronistic assassination methods, such as "flyswatting" (vehicular assassination) and cyanide pistols, in order for the villains to send a message to the West the Cold War is still ongoing for some hardliners. In fact, so much is made of the flyswatting incident at the beginning of the book, and how it was such an outmoded and inefficient way of killing a target, it comes off as odd when one remembers a French officer tried to "rough up" Bond by flyswatting him at the beginning of Gardner's previous book, The Man from Barbarossa. Either Gardner doesn't even remember what he wrote in his books himself, or he doesn't expect readers to remember what happened in his previous book.

Overall, the story is intriguing. People are executed constantly, and Bond doesn't know who to trust as no one is who he or she seems.

The book is weakest when Gardner takes shortcuts. For example, Bond has a layover in Heathrow Airport, where Q'ute meets him and gives him a gadget he uses a few pages later to immobilize someone. In the movies Q gives Bond the gadgets in the first act, we forget about them in the second, and then are delightedly surprised when they appear right when they're needed in the third. In another scene, Bond is unsure whether he can trust a man he has just met. He calls M, who tells him he can trust his new friend. Talk about telling and not showing. Also, without getting into spoilers, we can be pretty sure if Bond tells a woman he loves her, she is going to die. It is a cheap way to make it "now it's personal" and give Bond the extra motivation he needs to complete his mission.

This was the first Bond book after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which was James Bond's raison d'être. The novel plays with the idea ideologies die hard. It is a good transition to a post-Cold War era Bond.

[David]

As with most of the second-half of John Gardner's Bond novels, bits of this one work for me while other bits don't. I like the way that the word death is worked into every chapter title, and I like the basic plot of a network of agents being hunted one by one in the wake of the supposed end of the Cold War. What I don't like is the descent into having 007 actually fall in love with the Bond Girl of every book. The relationship with Easy Saint John doesn't work for me, nor does the abruptness of the way the relationship ends. I thought Bond's relationship with Harriet Horner in Scorpius was probably a mistake, and I find each new moment at which battle-hardened James Bond falls in love--truly, madly, deeply--all over again harder and harder to accept. To my way of thinking, the death of Tracy is too big a wound for any subsequent Bond Girl to heal. 007 should never have contemplated marriage again. Gardner has Bond fall in love, apparently genuinely, at least three times between books 7 and 13. I don't believe it. I also find that when 007 is in true romance mode, the writing often gets a bit pathetic.

[Steve Mitchell · Rating 1 out of 5]

This represents John Gardner’s eleventh novel in the James Bond canon – if you include the novelisation of the films – and it represents a low point. Our hero is sent into Europe to replace an assassinated agent handler along with a raw CIA agent. Elizabeth ‘Easy’ St John is a desk jockey with no field experience is sent to replace the murdered CIA representative that also controlled the blown Cabal spy network. Nearly every agent from Cabal has been killed following their receiving the signal to scatter and hide. The only problem is neither the SIS nor the CIA sent that signal. It is Bond and St John that are sent in to find the cause and bring out the survivors. Somebody somewhere is a double agent and once again Bond cannot trust anybody. This one really is a bit silly – even by the standards of Bond novels – and only really worth a look from serious fans of 007.

[Randal · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good spy novel, but not a good James Bond novel. Gardner's Bond lacks a certain something that Fleming's Bond had. Gardner couldn't quite capture Fleming's style of writing. Although the plot was interesting and contained enough action to be exciting, overall the book did not read like a James Bond book.

Rather Gardner's take on Bond was much more like the spy novels of John Le Carre. If you have read both Le Carre and Fleming, you will know the difference between the two types of "spy novels." And while both are great in their own way, I came into this book expecting James Bond and what I got was more like Le Carre's George Smiley.

[C.S. Daley · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was a kid I read License Renewed by John Gardner. It was love at first read. I loved Gardner's Bond but over time I loved him less and less. I decided recently to go back and read the last few Gardner Bond books. I get why I stopped reading them. The book isn't horrible but it is decidedly average.

It is also a bad Roger Moore James Bond plot. I am going to have to reevaluate the whole read the missing Gardner books or at least space them out a lot. Going to have to find another authors Bond first and hope it washes the average out of my mouth. I would give this a 2.5 star.

[Brian Gilchrist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give this book a better rating than the other Gardner books I have read. Just finishing icebreaker I was anticipating a multitude of double, triple and quadruple crosses, but fortunately that wasn't the case. The ending seemed a little anti climactic, but other than that a good book overall.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

You have to be a big James Bond fan to read this rather weak Gardner installment. Plot and characters were flat. Just not the 007 novel we know and love.

[Richard Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

For your eyes only: there are some minor spoilers ahead. Tread lightly, but it's still pretty safe.

Death and James Bond go hand in hand. He used to say Live and Let Die, but that’s only because You Only Live Twice. Yet whether you Win, Lose or Die, it seems that Nobody Lives Forever – not except possibly the future, as Tomorrow Never Dies. Bond almost always chose to Die Another Day, because it was No Time to Die. Then death caught up with him.

It probably says something about my state of mind that I read most of this book from the confines of a hospital bed. While the reason for my very short stay was never dire, one can’t help but reflect on mortality when one goes under the knife. James Bond, and perhaps writer John Gardner, also seemed to be concerned with the undiscovered country in this early 90s adventure.

This is arguably because it’s 1992. The Soviet Union has collapsed and the Cold War is ostensibly over. Following 1989’s Licence to Kill, the fate of 007’s cinematic future is uncertain. For the first time in Bond’s history, many of the things that grounded the franchise and its narrative have come untethered. Yet death remains a constant, and it is the jumping-off point for Gardner’s twelfth Bond adventure.

The death of two British agents in Germany, both killed in distinctively old school ways, is the jumping off point. Bond and CIA Agent “Easy” St. John (yes, really) are assigned the task of tracking down the surviving members of Cabal, a group still operating on a signal system of call-and-response phrases. Yet as more members of the group start dying, the ever-present hand of fate dangles closer to our favourite agent.

Gardner’s previous outing, The Man from Barbarossa, was a consciously different mix of tones and style. While it was the author’s favourite Bond book, it was met with mixed critical and fan reaction. DEATH IS FOREVER seems to take a far more restrained approach to spy fiction. The cheeky naming of Easy St. John seems to be a conscious throwback to yesteryear, as if Gardner was yelling: ‘You want Fleming? This is what Fleming did.’ Even the title, which Gardner once said he took from dialogue in a Stephen King book, is surely also a reference to the more famous Diamonds Are Forever.

Which isn’t to say that Gardner removes his own style from the book. One of the elements he has always brought to Bond is a sharply contemporary awareness of global events. As the book progresses, Bond uncovers the villain’s plot to murder the heads of various European countries during the inaugural run of the Eurostar from London to Paris, which occurred in the real world in a year after publication. It’s revealed that it’s all part of a plan to create havoc in the west and bring back Communism for a brand new season, another real fear that kind of played out over the next few decades.

This dedication to the real world was something Gardner took incredibly seriously. He always tried to visit the places Bond visited, or get his hands on the tech Bond used in the field. “Of the simple technology for instance the telescopic baton,” he said of DEATH IS FOREVER, “[is] ­now used extensively by police forces.” The more you know.

With a more streamlined storytelling, and eschewing the salaciousness that pervaded the previous Bond adventure, filled with white-knuckle moments and cliffhangers. A sandwich full of spiders is a memorable moment, continuing Gardner’s terrifying encounters with buglife such as the “constantly moving sea” of ants in For Special Services. It builds up to a knife fight, another gripping finale that Gardner does so well. He doesn’t completely shake off the old guard though, at one point describing “the kind of woman who, in a clinch, might well suffocate a man with the pneumatic beauty of her breasts.” There is a form of death I’d never pondered before now.

So, here we are thirty years later, and the world reacts to Russia invading Ukraine. The Cold War has managed to get a lot hotter. As far as the last film is concerned, James Bond’s future is on pause. Which isn’t too far from where Gardner was in 1992. For Bond, death has remained terminally impermanent, with the character rarely out of the spotlight. Like death and war, Bond is forever.

James Bond will return…in Never Send Flowers.

[Stuart Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cold War is over, and a group of assets known as the Cabal is forgotten by the allies. Two years later they remember that the Cabal exists when they finally notice that out of the original 30, 20 of them are dead. James Bond is sent with a girl form the CIA to pull in the remainder from the cold. Clearly the Cabal has been infiltrated so Bond is suspicious of all of them. When he does make contact in Berlin, things immediately go wrong. It soon becomes clear that the Cabal is being hunted by the #2 man in the old German Stasi, known as the Dwarf. Bond tries to make contact with the leader of the Cabal, a woman named Praxi, but he constantly meets with evidence that someone inside is plotting against him. He doesn't know who to trust, and the Dwarf has any army of Communist hardliners throughout Europe. He runs afoul of the French Secret Service, people keep getting killed all around him, and he can trust no one. Eventually he comes face to face with the Dwarf and finds that he has much bigger plans than just revenge against the Cabal.

This is less like a regular Bond novel and more of a normal spy thriller. Much time is spent on tradecraft, surveillance and counter-surveillance, much shaking tails and tailing people, with lots a secret codewords and a whole group of trained spies with their own sets of skills working with of against Bond. All along it remains unclear who is on whose side.

It is a pretty good thriller with lots of action and bunches of people getting dead by different means. Bond's CIA counterpart is useless, and the Cabal members often do not act in any way friendly. The villain is only superficially like a regular Bond villain in that he looks weird, but he does have a sufficiently deadly plan that could destabilize all of Europe. A lot of it is more like a Frederick Forsyth novel than anything Gardner has ever written. Gardner does reuse some stuff from previous novels, and we get reminded constantly that the Dwarf has an army of Commies ready to do his bidding. Would have been just as good as a regular spy novel without James Bond.

[Ira Livingston · Rating 1 out of 5]

DON'T READ LATER GARDNER BOND! Another plot of Europe focusing on the Stalinism beliefs of Soviet Communism. It just gets sillier as he teams up with a rookie agent, which once again Bond falls in love with... how many is that in Gardner's canon - we're 12 books into his era, and this plot device has happened 5-6 times. None of which could hold a candle to Tracy.

Gardner's Bond is not cold, hardened like Fleming intended. This Bond wears his heart on his sleeve consistently falling in love, and using innuendo he just gets sillier and sillier as you read Gardner.

And with all of the double, triple, and sometimes even quadruple turns from agents Gardner really become predictable for Bond. Fleming at least had you on the edge of your seat every book, but these seem silly, implausible and sometimes down right cliche.

Read only if you are striving to read every Bond as a die-hard otherwise, I wouldn't waste your time. You can see below how I rank the books in the series below;


Overall rating of book series:
1 - Casino Royale / On Her Majesty's Secret Service
2 - Goldfinger
3 - From Russia with Love
4 - Live and Let Die
5 - Diamonds are Forever / Dr. No / For Special Services
6 - Moonraker / Scorpius
7 - License Renewed
8 - Thunderball
9 - Colonel Sun
10 - You Only Live Twice / Icebreaker
11 - James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me (Wood)
12 - For Your Eyes Only / Octopussy & The Living Daylights
13 - The Man with the Golden Gun
14 - The Spy Who Loved Me
15 - Nobody Lives Forever
16 - No Deals, Mr. Bond
17 - James Bond and Moonraker (Wood)
18 - The Man from Barbarossa
19 - Win, Lose or Die
20 - Role of Honor / Brokenclaw
21 - Death is Forever
22 - Licence to Kill

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK but not up to Ian Fleming standards. Yes there is action, but the narrative get bogged down as Bond tries to sort out the details of the nefarious plot and whom to trust. We don’t even meet Bond’s nemesis, Wolfie Weisen, a.k.a. the Poison Dwarf, until we are more than two-thirds through the book. In my imagination this part could have been played by the late Verne Troyer, the Mini-Me character in the Austin Powers series.
In the Ian Fleming novels and films, Bond is usually paired with a sexy but lethal spy. Indeed the cover of the paperback promises, “Agent 007 meets the CIA’s sexiest spy!” Easy St. John is neither sexy nor competent having no field experience or tradecraft. When Bond professes his love for Easy, I lost all respect for 007. At least Gardner could have given her a salacious name like Easy Inbed!
The ending is anticlimactic and foolhardy. When Bond restores electricity to the Chunnel railroad tracks in order to fry Weisen and his minions, who just happen to all be standing on the third rail, did he not stop to consider that he could have detonated the train carrying all of Europe’s heads-of-state? And are we to believe that the venerable 007 was almost bested in knife fight with a middle-aged woman?

[Ben Tucker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came into this one not expecting to enjoy it. I love Fleming’s Bond but having researched Gardner’s incarnation I had avoided spending money on his books. This and “Seafire” popped up in my local library so I thought I’d give them a go. Nobody likes a know-it-all but I was correct in my assumption on this occasion. It just isn’t James Bond the literary character, without meaning to sound rude I’m at a loss as to how Gardner was allowed to write 16 instalments in the series as his take on Bond is so far removed from Ian Fleming’s that they are one and the same in name only. If you like the Roger Moore/Pierce Brosnan screen Bond (many do) then this will pass muster. If you want Bond as written by Fleming then steer clear.

[Sebastian Cioffi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this is a good story. I would call it your typical spy novel with dash of Bond elements here and there. This is more of a suspense side of the fence telling focusing more on the “who did it?” aspect. It is engaging mostly though out and fun to read especially as the action starts to ramp up. That being said the supporting character development was weak at best, I was very disappointed in the depth of his love interests if any. The ending is where this book falls flat. It does no justice to any of the build up to the point. I felt like it was slapped on. All in all it’s worth a good read through.

[David M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't realize that this was a James Bond novel when I picked it up in a yard sale. I thought that the Bond series ended when Ian Fleming died. I read all of Fleming's works when I was a teenager. I still like them, maybe because they bring me back to my youth. They also provided a glimpse into the Cold War years and what the world was like back then. (The James Bond movies, with a few exceptions, were poor adaptations of the stories designed purely to cash in on the popularity of the genre.)

Anyway, I was surprised at how well Gardner recaptured the essence of the original Fleming characters and stories. I may try another of his offerings.

[Paul Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly the best in the Gardner series so far, paying homage to Fleming whilst incorporating his own trademarks. For Fleming there is the cold war methods of killing, a poisonous spider in a hotel sandwich, a fight on a train and an attack after the main business is concluded. For Gardner there is the usual treachery and uncertainty about who is actually on Bond's side, a girl killed who makes Bond think again about his dead wife, plus links to current events, in this case the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Still find it hard to picture Bond active in the 1990s though.

[Eric Keegan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than Barbarossa, but still not the old John that I grew to admire with the first half of his canon. Bond is back in savage form, as opposed to the humdrum behind the scenes Bond who investigates and dawdles about with poor plotting. Great beginning, for once a non-fizzled out conclusion, but the middle work is where Gardner once again flounders with overcomplicated and unnecessary spy game depth. Too many flat characters and too few memorable ones. Let’s see what his next book has in store!

[Tony Drummond · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts well with a tone being of a 50/60s spy thriller. Bond travels across Europe using spy tradecraft and never being sure who to trust.

As we move into the second half of the book things start to unravel. Characters have silly names; sexism comes to the fore and the villain is underwhelming. The ending is also a little rushed and it feels as if the author run out of pages.

As with most of Gardner's Bond novels there are lots of potential early in the book but things fizzle out towards the end.

[Jeff Mayo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weak for Gardner, weak for Bond. It is another one with Bond and a woman chasing down an assassin in Europe. It has two redeeming qualities. The first is that, for a Bond novel, it is remarkably planted in the real world. The book was published in 1992, a year after the real failed Russian coup. The second is that it is amazingly short, my copy was just 224 pages.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been my least favorite Gardner 007 book thus far. It’s a very Daltonesque storyline when everyone involved in the franchise was still trying to figure out what to do with Bond in a post Cold War world. The story was good and the plot more realistic than many 007 novels, but realism is not really why you come to a Bond story.

[Padraic Ó Broin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I may return to edit this and expand this review, but for now I'll just say I'm glad I finished it. and I've 4 more Gardner books to read.

I may write more on my thoughts of this book, but I'm just happy to have finished it and wish to put the book away and move on as swiftly as possible. To another genre perhaps for a little while.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid spy thriller from Mr. Gardner. Some slight missteps with forced humor (in the form of lame, out of place one-liners), but otherwise a taut read. Perhaps a bit quick with the ending, as well, but otherwise one of the stronger entries in this post-Fleming series.

[Glenn Colby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. I am looking forward to more books by this author, the book was a bit confusing at times to follow, but interesting. He writes James Bond books. I have never read any Ian Fleming and now I am looking forward to that.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

It very well could have been trying to read this during Covid-19 but this book didn't pull me in. This Gardner Bond seemed to have twists for the sake of twists and thus it lost me what with being distracted by following the pandemic and the protests.

[Terry Cornell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A more believable plot line compared to some of Gardner's later Bond books. Enjoyed the story, a couple of twists towards the end. His latest 'love' interest seemed like a very un-developed relationship. This book gives me more hope for enjoying the rest of Gardner's Bond series.