A Review By Keith Smith

I fairly recently returned to some of the original James Bond novels, and only then remembered how good a writer Fleming was. They are really rather good. Taut writing, exciting plots, page turners. So, it was with interest that I turned to Jeffery Deaver’s version of Bond. Obviously Deaver is a much acclaimed thriller writer in his own right, and one might expect a novel that stands on its own. But this is so disappointing. The writing is not taunt, the plot is convoluted, and I ended up not really caring whether Bond solved the big plot, and sorted out his love life or not. Deaver tries to be better than Fleming…unfortunately he is not a patch on him. It’s quite a long book, I persevered, and wished I had not.