With a Mind to Kill: A James Bond Novel

Product Information

It’s almost uncanny how well Mr. Horowitz summons Bond’s mindset . . . Yet this Bond also feels the winds of change: 'He had his licence to kill. But was it possible that in this new, more questioning age, that licence might have expired?' A drop of retro pleasures, a pinch of things to come; shaken, not stirred." — Wall Street Journal Straight away Horowitz is able to capture Fleming's flowing style and intricate details from how Bond likes his eggs in the morning to the cars he drives... He's just as faithfully suave as in the original novels. Daily Express What makes the Horowitz books so compelling and unique is that they really feel like modern versions of Fleming's texts. Horowitz is the only Bond continuation author who was able to use unpublished Ian Fleming material and weave it into wholly original adventures. In Trigger Mortis, this results in some actual Fleming prose lifted from a manuscript called “Hell on Wheels,” which gives one racecar sequence a heart-stopping zing. In Forever and a Day, some of Fleming’s travelogue prose is incorporated, as are some concepts from an unmade James Bond TV series. While these details give the Horowitz Bond novels an extra touch of legitimacy, you’d hardly notice which aspects came from Horowitz and which came from Fleming. The prose style of these books is perfect. If Horowitz were James Bond’s tailor, he’d be like Eva Green in the 2006 movie version of Casino Royale, able to size up Bond and create the perfect suit for him with just one glance. Anthony Horowitz's second James Bond book will keep 007 obsessives happy with martinis, beautiful women and an enormously fat Corsican gangster. The Times *Best New Novels* The second guy is given the same task, he looks very unhappy, but goes into the room to find his wife, but he just can't bring himself to do it and walks out with his arm around her, both in tears, apologising to the CIA management that he's not their man.

Before traveling from Leningrad to Moscow by train, Bond reminisces about his encounter with Red Grant aboard the Orient Express.

Anthony Horowitz

Exciting high drama. Horowitz stays loyal to the fabulous Fleming formula. And for that he surely deserves another mission guiding the fortunes of the world's favourite superspy. Daily Express With a stronger story than his previous two, this is easily Anthony Horowitz’s best Bond novel; making it, for me, the best of all the non-Fleming Bond’s that I've read. It flows logically and ends terrifically, better in fact than many of Fleming’s originals. I don’t think endings were his thing. One of my favourites, Dr No, was a wonderfully atmospheric book, but I think Fleming was laughing over a gin on the veranda of Goldeneye in coming up with the great Dr’s demise! Even better than Trigger Mortis. it is tremendous fun. Anthony Horowitz has the discipline and skill of a first-class action writer. Sunday Express This is set a couple of weeks after Fleming’s “Man with the Golder Gun”, Bond is recovering from brainwashing and an intense ordeal, and he is very much a damaged man. But a mission arises that may be vital to the safety of the Western world and, despite not being ready, Bond volunteers to put himself in the hands of the Russians, acting if the brainwashing is still in place.

Katya Leonova is a far more rounded Bond lady than the norm for these novels, and Horowitz, I think, does well to make her changes of view and emotions believable. As for the villains? They’re all, quite rightly, thoroughly nasty bastards! Meanwhile, Bond is returning from Jamaica and his encounter with Scaramanga ( The Man with the Golden Gun). He is aware of a world that is changing all too rapidly around him. The old certainties of the post-years have gone. The intelligence services are no long trusted. He is beginning to wonder if his "license to kill" may even be valid any more. So it was a downbeat end for the Horowitz Bond trilogy, maybe even qualifying for an Unsatisfactory Ending Alert™. I am rather more hopeful for the new Kim Sherwood Double-00 trilogy which started off with Double or Nothing (September 2022) [4 **** stars] even if it is set up as an intentional icon-breaker. Whenever I read a James Bond novel, I always wonder which version of 007 I will see. Once I understood the timeline of WITH A MIND TO KILL, which wraps up Anthony Horowitz’s Bond trilogy, I had my answer.It is M's funeral. One man is missing from the graveside: the traitor who pulled the trigger and who is now in custody, accused of M's murder—James Bond. In a mission where treachery is all around and one false move means death, Bond must grapple with the darkest questions about himself. But not even he knows what has happened to the man he used to be. Ascended Extra: The novel's Big Bad is Colonel Boris, who was briefly mentioned at the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun as the Soviet officer responsible for brainwashing Bond and sending him to assassinate M. The story begins in Moscow where a new organisation, Stalnaya Ruska, Iron Hand - a successor to Smersh - is planning a major act of terrorism which is intended to destabilise relations between east and west. This doesn’t really feel that way. Is government agent by nature, in days before HR practice has catch-on on the suffering of the work force.