Fred > Recent Status Updates

Brilliant, engrossing storytelling. Love it.

This is fantastic so far. I was never sold on Young Bond - but now I’ve tried it and it’s outstanding.

“Some of the prose was unnecessarily purple. Just say what you have to say, and then move on and say something else. Sometimes, after all, the sky is just blue.” (102)

Whenever I haven’t had a 5-star read for a while, I pick up a John Boyne.

Hang on, so there are two villains in this one: Thackeray, the head of EurAsia Enterprises who might be in with the terrorists who have attacked Brits in Hong Kong…and Li Xu, a guy in charge of brothels who is known to be the head of the Triads. Bond and Sunni (the Bond girl) have just narrowly escaped death at the latter’s henchmen’s hands.

Note to any murderers: don’t wipe your fingerprints off the bottle, or smooth your footprints out of the soil. You’ll also get rid of the prints that are SUPPOSED to be there (like the gardener’s!), so it’s a dead giveaway that someone’s intervened.

This second half is disappointing. Not Agatha’s best.

The protagonist has just described an old man as “a wrinkled, dried-up, mummified old morsel of humanity”. Damn, Agatha!

Phenomenal.

This is a stone-cold masterpiece and Horowitz’s best Bond novel by a landslide.