Sin wants to blow up Manhattan with a bomb-carrying train, not so much because of his political bias as to revenge himself on Americans who killed too many Koreans during the war over there. He tries to bury Bond alive and the reader is treated to all the grisly moments of suffocating on dirt. The chief fiend this time around is a Korean known as Jason Sin who uses a pack of lethal playing cards offering assorted forms of nasty death as his means of executing offenders.

The reader has to keep in mind that the book is set in the Cold War and the race for space, with evil Russians represented by Bond’s old enemy SMERSH. You can’t complain about any lack of melodrama. He displays equal skill again as he explains why a space rocket didn’t succeed and the reasons for its failure. He demonstrates his reliance on their aid in quite remarkably detailed chapters on daredevil car racing when Bond is assigned to a Grand Prix to save an English driver and for good measure turns a Russian secret agent to toast. Horowitz obviously did his technical homework, as he generously acknowledges in an admission that he could not have offered such details without the help of genuine experts. Rescued by Bond, she survives and ungratefully runs off with a glamorous English lesbian whose charms apparently appeal to her even more than those of Mr. The author gives only fleeting attention to the notorious Pussy although she has her moment of fame when two bad guys paint her a lethal shade of gold which will clog her pores to the point of painfully asphyxiating her. It’s not as if the plot could or should be taken seriously except by perfectionists who grumble at Bond’s choosing to drink a Negroni instead of a martini before he beds Jeopardy Lane, a Secret Service agent who is more serious about her work than Pussy Galore.

Trigger mortis review