With a Mind to Kill: A James Bond Novel

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While being subjected to physical and psychological torture in the "magic room" by Colonel Boris, Bond hallucinates people and events from previous novels, including Scaramanga, Rosa Klebb, and the poisonous centipede that Dr. No once sent to kill him. A spy is dead. A legend is born. This is how it all began. The explosive prequel to Casino Royale, from bestselling author Anthony Horowitz. Although Horowitz may not have the detailed descriptive talent of Ian Fleming his characters are spot on. Katya Leonova is a wonderful creation & worthy of any Fleming novel, as are many of the characters throughout this novel. I was really looking forward to the books as the movie franchise with Craig after CR went a direction that was not my cup of tea, and not like the books about the mission but it turned into a bloody family soap.

What makes the Horowitz books so compelling and unique is that they really feel like modern versions of Fleming's texts. Horowitz is the only Bond continuation author who was able to use unpublished Ian Fleming material and weave it into wholly original adventures. In Trigger Mortis, this results in some actual Fleming prose lifted from a manuscript called “Hell on Wheels,” which gives one racecar sequence a heart-stopping zing. In Forever and a Day, some of Fleming’s travelogue prose is incorporated, as are some concepts from an unmade James Bond TV series. While these details give the Horowitz Bond novels an extra touch of legitimacy, you’d hardly notice which aspects came from Horowitz and which came from Fleming. The prose style of these books is perfect. If Horowitz were James Bond’s tailor, he’d be like Eva Green in the 2006 movie version of Casino Royale, able to size up Bond and create the perfect suit for him with just one glance. Internationally bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s third James Bond novel, after Forever and a Day.Ascended Extra: The novel's Big Bad is Colonel Boris, who was briefly mentioned at the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun as the Soviet officer responsible for brainwashing Bond and sending him to assassinate M. Katya Leonova is a far more rounded Bond lady than the norm for these novels, and Horowitz, I think, does well to make her changes of view and emotions believable. As for the villains? They’re all, quite rightly, thoroughly nasty bastards! Whether deliberately or subconsciously there are elements of The Ipcress File here, but as that's a classic 60's spy story I can forgive him.

Mythology Gag: At one point, Bond considers settling down in Jamaica if he ever resigns from the Secret Service...which is precisely what his cinematic counterpart did in No Time to Die.

The second guy is given the same task, he looks very unhappy, but goes into the room to find his wife, but he just can't bring himself to do it and walks out with his arm around her, both in tears, apologising to the CIA management that he's not their man. While Horowitz 007 was thinking about his past and who played a role in it towards which extend they played a role. You realise that this Bond is a very good 00 agent and does the job so well because he likes and enjoys the job. Some people are just like that. The sense of well being come from not only not being harmed. The sense of wellbeing come from accepting the risk and the harm and feel it is all worth it.

The story begins in Moscow where a new organisation, Stalnaya Ruska, Iron Hand - a successor to Smersh - is planning a major act of terrorism which is intended to destabilise relations between east and west. Bond is still very Bond, but he is older and jaded and, maybe for the first time, overconfident. There are plenty of typical Bond moments to enjoy but there is a definite theme of a man out of his depth and at the end of his career. Can he pull it together in time to not only survive intact but complete his mission, or is this the end of the line for 007? Meanwhile, Colonel Boris and other leaders he is working with are still not 100% behind Bond and have one more test. They came across a boorish American named Garfinkel who will swear that Bond is actually an agent he knows by another name who he recently saw several times in Jamaica working closely with Scaramanga. Colonel Boris knows this could not be possible if Bond was still their brainwashed operative in London on mission to assassinate M. Of course, MI6 is still helping out where they can and Garfinkel’s run-in with Bond proves to be nothing more than mistaken identity, allowing our favorite spy to dodge a deadly bullet. So overall it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The writing is certainly well up to standard, fast-paced and exciting in all the right places. When I started reading it seemed like it might be the best of the Horowitz trilogy. Perhaps it was being caught two weeks behind and under pressure to read and review the book, but for me it sometimes falls short as a James Bond novel. With a Mind to Kill (WaMtK) is Anthony Horowitz's final book in his James Bond trilogy which was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate. It follows a mid-career Bond in Trigger Mortis (2015) and a pre-007 Bond in Forever and a Day (2018). In terms of chronology, the latter is a prequel to Fleming's original Casino Royale (James Bond #1 - 1953) and the former follows after Goldfinger (James Bond #7 - 1959).

Continuity Nod: Since the novel is at least partly intended to be a Grand Finale of sorts to the literary Bond's story, there are understandably numerous references and allusions to the events of Fleming's previous novels.