Dragon's Claw

by Peter O'Donnell

Sailing in the Tasman Sea Modesty Blaise discovers Luke Fletcher, one of Britain's greatest artists, lost in the middle of the ocean, alone on a raft, and with a strange gap in his memory. It leads her to the mystery of the nest of evil known as Dragon's Claw.
Modesty and her loyal lieutenant, Willie Garvin, become involved in a complex of murder mysteries, struggling against the baffling activities of unknown enemies. Only when Modesty and Willie are helpless captives do they discover the identities of those they must overcome.
Against them are a group of deadly killers working for an unknown master. The Reverend Uriah Crisp is an ordained minister and the greatest shot with a handgun in the world, and believes that his victims are sinners who deserve their fate. Beauregard Browne is a master of disguise and mimicry, who kills his victims using the famous handkerchief trick, and is accompanied by his county companion, Clarissa de Courtney - Scott.
As usual ingenuity and resourcefulness help Modesty and Willie win the day as they escape Dragon's Claw and find themselves in a fight to the death.

552 pages, Paperback

Published July 19, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Peter O'Donnell also wrote as Madeleine Brent.

http://www.cs.umu.se/~kenth/modesty.html
is an excellent resource on this author.

To help keep the novels and the adventure strip collections separate, here's some info about the Modesty Blaise works.

In 1963, O'Donnell began his 38-year run as writer of the Modesty Blaise adventure story strip, which appeared six days a week in English and Scottish newspapers. He retired the strip in 2001.

Each strip story took 18-20 weeks to complete. Several publishers over the years have attempted to collect these stories in large softcovers. Titan Publishing is currently in the process of bringing them all out in large-format softcover, with 2-3 stories in each books. These are called "graphic novels" in the Goodreads title.

Meanwhile, during those 38 years, O'Donnell also wrote 13 books about Modesty Blaise: 11 novels and 2 short story/novella collections. These stories are not related to the strip stories; they are not novelizations of strip stories. They are entirely new, though the characters and "lives" are the same. These have been labeled "series #0".

There is a large article on Peter O'Donnell on Wikipedia, with a complete bibliography.