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Summary
Summary
"Horowitz delivers an entertainment sure to please James Bond fans."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The heart of any good thriller is the plot, and...Horowitz doesn't disappoint."
-- New York Times Book Review
Blockbuster author Anthony Horowitz delivers a riveting and stylish take on literary legend James Bond (authorized by the Ian Fleming Estate) with a story that unfolds in the 1950s--and is the first new Bond novel to feature recently discovered original material by Ian Fleming.
It's 1957 and James Bond (agent 007) has only just survived his showdown with Auric Goldfinger at Fort Knox. By his side is Pussy Galore, who was with him at the end. Unknown to either of them, the USSR and the West are in a deadly struggle for technological superiority. And SMERSH is back.
The Soviet counter-intelligence agency plans to sabotage a Grand Prix race at the most dangerous track in Europe. But it's Bond who finds himself in the driving seat and events take an unexpected turn when he observes a suspicious meeting between SMERSH's driver and a sinister Korean millionaire, Jai Seong Sin.
Soon Bond is pitched into an entirely different race uncovering a plan that could bring the West to its knees.
Welcoming back familiar faces, including M and Miss Moneypenny, international bestselling author Anthony Horowitz ticks all the boxes: speed, danger, strong women and fiendish villains, to reinvent the golden age of Bond in this brilliantly gripping adventure. Trigger Mortis is also the first James Bond novel to feature previously unseen Ian Fleming material.
This is James Bond as Fleming imagined him.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this impressive James Bond pastiche from bestseller Horowitz (Moriarty) set in 1957 soon after the action of Goldfinger, a German rocket scientist working for the U.S. sells secrets about a forthcoming American launch. Meanwhile, Bond, who's living in London with Pussy Galore, of Goldfinger fame, travels to Germany to participate in an auto race, during which the Soviet SMERSH agency is planning to kill a British driver. (This section is based on original unpublished material written by Ian Fleming.) At the race, Bond encounters evil genius Sin Jai-Seong, a Korean multimillionaire; meets Jeopardy Lane, who has her own reasons for pursuing Jai-Seong; and discovers photos of an American rocket (the title refers to a "panic button" that can explode a malfunctioning rocket before it crashes). The sturdy plot involves a suitably diabolical and grandiose scheme. An excellent mimic of Fleming's prose, Horowitz delivers an entertainment sure to please James Bond fans. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
JAMES BOND IS a synchronic spy. From the day that the first Bond thriller, "Casino Royale," was published in 1953, all the way through to this year's forthcoming "Spectre" movie, Bond has always been thoroughly modern, with all the latest toys. In "Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel," however, Bond ventures somewhere Ian Fleming, or the movie producer Albert Broccoli, would never go: back, into the past. "Trigger Mortis" is a sequel, of sorts, to 1959's "Goldfinger," which means that it too is set in the late 1950s. The author, Anthony Horowitz, commissioned by the Fleming estate to write a book "that could have come from Ian's own typewriter," says that he tried to write "the most authentic James Bond novel anyone could have written," while also admitting that "trying to capture Fleming's style was not easy." In truth, the task is impossible. The Bond of "Goldfinger" isn't only a sexist drunk who dismisses women by saying things like "There's no point in being a suffragette about this"; he's also an unapologetic racist who looks out from his hotel room at gardeners "picking up leaves with the lethargic slow motion of colored help" and sees Koreans as being "rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy." So although "Trigger Mortis" begins two weeks after the end of "Goldfinger," its protagonist isn't - could never be - the same Bond. The new Bond is friends with a gay man, chivalrously sleeps on the couch when a woman doesn't want to have sex with him and even, at one point, drinks a bottle of water at lunch. What's more, where before there were only Bond "girls," now we find strong, independent Bond "women." One of them shows little interest in him and goes off with a woman instead; another, Jeopardy Lane, is a bona fide action hero in her own right. Setting a new Bond novel in the past has other problems too. While it's easy for thriller writers to get excited about today's state-of-the-art gadgets, it's much harder to realistically convey how a spy would have felt about the toys of 55 years ago. "Trigger Mortis" is clearly underpinned by a large amount of diligent research, but the recitation of the horsepower of a V-2 rocket, or the muzzle velocity of an M60 machine gun, feels somehow dutiful. And Horowitz's research sometimes comes up puzzlingly short: Rail sheds were at no time illuminated by "neon lights hung on chains." More glaringly, New Yorkers could have told him that there aren't two stations between Jay Street and York Street on the F line. Still, the heart of any thriller is the plot, and here Horowitz doesn't disappoint. The action moves with high velocity from Britain to Germany to the United States and back to Britain, the odds are always in the bad guys' favor, and the villain is a dastardly millionaire straight out of central casting. A mysterious mogul with a dark history and no regard for human life, he also has, naturally, a weakness for delaying the execution of spies by explaining to them, in detail, the cunning and despicable plot they were sent to discover. He should have killed Bond when he had the chance. Horowitz also stays true to the Bond of Fleming's books rather than the Bond of the movies. His hero is human, self-doubting, weak, in a way that is hard for a movie star to be in the context of a decades-long franchise and Monty Norman's immortal James Bond theme. And while Horowitz's loving pastiche lacks Fleming's flashes of brilliance, it should be more than good enough for the fans. The only real question is why anybody felt the need for this book to be written in the first place. Much of the excitement of Bond comes from his contemporaneity. Instead of trying to rehabilitate the bigoted Bond of the 1950s, we should keep our dapper spy in the movies of the present, where he belongs. FEUX SALMON is a senior editor at Fusion.
