James Bond (10)

James Bond, Ian Fleming’s master spy, has returned, and He’s better than ever. Miss Moneypenny thinks so, and so soon will Lavender Peacock, the beautiful ward of the Laird of Mulcaldy. Political restraints are squeezing the department — but M still turns to his top agent when the country needs a trouble shooter. And one of those moments has arrived with an ominous meeting between an international terrorist and the top nuclear physicist, Anton Murik, Laird of Mulcaldy. Only James Bond can challenge a dangerously deranged opponent bent on the destruction of the Western World in a nuclear holocaust…

Sir Robert King, a wealthy oil tycoon, is murdered in an unprecedented bombing at the Secret Inteligence Service's London headquarters. M takes the attack personally and sends James Bond to what was once the USSR to protect King's heiress, his beautiful and fiery daughter Elektra. For the bombing is the work of "Renard", the cruel and cunning terrorist who once kidnapped Elekrta King and held her to ransom.

With nuclear weapons expert Dr Christmas Jones at his side, Bond travels to the Caspian Sea - where a former enemy becomes a formidable ally - before the final dramatic confrontation in the claustrophobic confines of a nuclear submarine beneath the surface of the Bosphorus

Bond reluctantly finds himself recruited into a dangerous mission involving an equally dangerous and treacherous alliance of agents from the CIA, the KGB and Israel's Mossad. The team dubbed 'Icebreaker' waste no time double crossing each other, as they try to root out the leader of the murderous National Socialist Action Army, Count Konrad von Gloda, a one time SS officer, who now perceives himself as the New Adolf Hitler.

On holiday in Victoria, British Columbia, Bond becomes intrigued Lee Fu-Chu, a half-Blackfoot, half-Chinese philanthropist who is known as "Brokenclaw" because of a deformed hand. On his return to the UK Bond is tasked to investigate the kidnapping of several scientists who have been working on a new submarine detection system. It becomes clear that Brokenclaw is behind the kidnapping and worse, he has a devastating plan to cause economic meltdown through the collapse of the dollar. Bond has no choice but to enter his lair ...

From Publishers Weekly

Called upon to keep submarine-detection secrets away from the Chinese, James Bond combats Brokenclaw, the fiendish, sexually insatiable man whose nickname is a reference to a deformed left hand. "Bond is both obnoxious and racist," said PW , warning that threatened and actual brutality toward women and disparaging remarks about Asians are but a few of this novel's faults.

Russian terrorists kidnap a man suspected of Nazi war crimes--and get the wrong man. The rebels threaten to kill their captive unless ten million dollars and the real war criminal are delivered to them within 72 hours. Only the KGB's newest secret weapon could possibly stop their plan--Comrade James Bond. 

From Kirkus Reviews

Gardner rouses himself for more elaborate plotting than usual in his tenth stint as Ian Fleming's stand-in, but Gardner's James Bond, on loan to the KGB for some antiterrorist housecleaning, has aged a lot less gracefully than Sean Connery. A dissident Russian cabal calling itself The Scales of Justice (SoJ) has kidnapped somebody it claims is Josif Vorontsov, notorious second-in-command at Babi Yar, from his home in New Jersey and threatened to assassinate high-level brass hats until the government takes Vorontsov off their hands and places him on trial for war crimes. When the Kremlin denies that SoJ has the real Vorontsov and refuses to recognize his extradition, SoJ begins taking out high-level brass hats, and the KGB asks British Intelligence to let them have somebody--guess who--able to infiltrate SoJ by substituting for two English-speaking recruits. Gardner lays some promising trails--Bond working for the KGB, Bond partnered by Mossad agent Pete Natkowitz, two interloping French agents (one a natural bedmate), the news that SoJ intends to videotape its own free-lance war-crimes trial, and all the usual seductions, killings, double-crosses, flashbacks, and intimations of The End (this time by hard-liners bombing Washington while the US is busy bombing Baghdad)--but the going keeps getting muddier, as if somebody else had finished the book over a third martini (shaken, not stirred). Bond saves the world, gets the woman and the Order of Lenin, and turns in a less muffled performance than in last year's Brokenclaw, though still below average for Gardner's series. Let's not talk about how far below Fleming's average.

The world's most famous spy is being hunted by the KGB, and he will need all his wits to negotiate the labyrinth of double-crosses that will lead him to a showdown in a remote corner of Hong Kong.

Between the Danish island of Bornholm and the Baltic coast of East Germany a nuclear submarine of the Royal Navy surfaces under the cloak of darkness. James Bond and two marines slip quietly from the forward hatch into their powered inflatable raft and set off for a lonely beach where they are to collect two young women. Planted to seduce communist agents to run for cover in the West, they have been rumbled by the other side. Bond little knows that this routine exercise is but the prelude to a nerve-racking game of bluff and double bluff, played with consummate skill by his own chief M against the East German HVA and the elite branch of the KGB, formed from Bond's old adversary SMERSH.

The KGB is soon on the scene, but nothing is what it seems, and Bond finds he needs all his wits to negotiate the labyrinth of double-crosses that will lead him to a bewildering showdown in a remote corner of the Kowloon province of Hong Kong. There, with only the trusted belt of secret weapons specially devised by Q branch, he has to fight a terrifying duel in the dark, with all the cards in the hands of his opponents.

En Route to retrieve his faithful housekeeper, May, from a European health clinic where she is recovering from an illness, Bond is warned by the British Secret Service that Tamil Rahani, the current leader of SPECTRE, now dying from wounds suffered during his last encounter with Bond, has put a price on Bond's head...

James Bond 007 reluctantly returns to active service, his mission to protect an observer of a NATO exercise, Admiral Sergei Yevgennevich Pauker, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy.

From Publishers Weekly

Fortunately for Gardner, dyed-in-the wool James Bond fans may be disposed to overlook the lack of credibility and characterization in this latest thriller featuring the superspy. The leaders of Britain, Russia and the U.S. are planning a top-secret summit aboard HMS Invincible . We never learn what they want to talk about, but we do know that BAST (Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terror) is up to some high-level nastiness. Alerted to the threat, British Intelligence sends James Bond to protect the "heads of state." Promoted to captain, Bond is trained on Harrier jump-jets, and narrowly escapes death when a Sidewinder missile intercepts his flight path. Human menaces include "the Cat," a mysterious female terrorist, and "the Viper," head of BAST. A lot of huffing, puffing, padding ("Bond has not shown all his cards") and sloppy writing ("the first kind of ship of her type") occur before a limp confrontation that takes place inside the Rock of Gibraltar, with chief villain Bassam Baradj, inanely "born plain Robert Besavitsky, in the old Hell's Kitchen area of New York." 

When an officer of the British Security Service is murdered in Switzerland, James Bond becomes involved in a deadly game of hide and seek. He follows a sinister shadow across the world, from Athens to Milan, Singapore, the USA and ultimately to EuroDisney. By the author of "Death is Forever".

From Publishers Weekly

This sketchy detective story requires a knowledge of James Bond movies rather than Ian Fleming novels, which may explain why it reads like a rough draft for a screenplay. In Gardner's 12th 007 book (after Death Is Forever ), the ageless agent from Her Majesty's Secret Service is sent to Switzerland to investigate the murder of MI5 operative Laura March. Teaming up with Swiss agent Flica von Gruss, he discovers that March's brother was a serial killer and that her ex-lover was legendary English actor David Dragonpol, now retired and living in a fairy-tale castle on the Rhine. Dragonpol's sister, Maeve Horton, proves to be the link between March's death and four recent assassinations; a Bleeding Heart rose bred by Horton appeared at the funeral of each of the victims, March included. Bond and von Gruss pursue the case to Dragonpol's castle in Germany, where the usual fiendish plot is uncovered and ultimately resolved in the traditional Bond manner. This light, entertaining read doesn't pretend to be anything more than another episode in what has turned into a never-ending adventure. 

From Kirkus Reviews

Like Pentagon dinosaurs laboring to adapt to a new world order by finding telltale traces of the old in every dark shadow, Gardner's reincarnation of James Bond examines a string of serial killings and finds a freelance terrorist just as dangerous as his old adversaries from SMERSH and SPECTRE. Bond's called in when MI5 agent Laura March is killed at Interlaken. Going through the things in her hotel room, he and Flicka Von Grsse, his leggy opposite number from Swiss Intelligence, find a disturbing letter from Laura to her late brother, a serial beheader of blonds, and fax a copy back to M. While they're coupling in Bond's room, the letter itself is stolen, and M, citing the ``grave moral scandal'' (so much for updating Bond's morality), ostensibly removes Bond from duty. Back in England for Laura's funeral, Bond notices a bizarre floral tribute--a red-tipped white rose--linking Laura's death to four other recent assassinations, and to the flower's only breeder: Maeve Horton, sister of Laura's onetime fianc‚, distinguished actor David Dragonpol. There follow the requisite scenes of tourist-trap mayhem--at Schloss Drache, Dragonpol's Alpine aerie, atop the roof of the Duomo in Milan, and at EuroDisney, where the murderer has planned one last, ultra-high-profile strike--but Gardner's lack of conviction reduces everything to retro-fluff. Bond really isn't cut out for the work of tracking down serial killers, even the ones whose targets include Yasir Arafat and Kiri Te Kanawa. As Gardner struggles to update the perils his superstar hero faces, Bond himself remains the biggest anachronism of all.  

Academy Award nominee Donald Westlake (The Grifters) returns with a never-before-published thriller based on his story for a James Bond movie that never got made with an afterword by Bond producer Jeff Kleeman.

A formerly rich businessman thrown out of Hong Kong when the Chinese took over from the British decides to fix his dire financial problems and take revenge on the Chinese by tunneling under Hong Kong’s bank vaults and stealing all their gold, then using a doomsday device to set off a “soliton wave” that will turn the ground to sludge, causing the whole city to collapse. Only the engineer on his staff who designed the soliton wave technology (intending it for good purposes, to help with construction projects) can stop him, working together with a beautiful young environmental activist who gets caught up in one of the soliton tests and nearly killed.

From the deck of a yacht near the Great Barrier Reef to Australia and Singapore and finally Hong Kong itself, it’s a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as our heroes first struggle to escape the villain’s clutches and then thwart his insanely destructive plan.