NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
With all the ingredients the listener expects from a James Bond novel, this prequel to CASINO ROYALE introduces the younger James Bond as he earns his license to kill. Narrator Matthew Goode does a sterling job of taking the listener back to the 1950s and helps paint a picture of a postwar world full of steely spies, truly evil villains, and, of course, a beautiful woman. Listeners get a true sense of the time, and Goode’s characterizations help to conjure up images of opportunistic characters finding new openings in peacetime Europe. His narration helps create the feel of a traditional James Bond story, full of adventure combined with the reassurance of a predictable outcome. His pacing is a perfect match for this latest take on Ian Fleming’s legacy. K.J.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
08/06/2018
Bestseller Horowitz boldly creates an origin story for 007 in his entertaining second James Bond pastiche (after 2015’s Trigger Mortis), a prequel to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953). The arresting opening sentence, “So, 007 is dead,” refers to Bond’s predecessor, whose body was found floating in the water off Marseilles, where he was investigating the activities of the Corsican underworld. M dispatches Bond, newly recruited to the Double-O section, to the South of France to track down the agent’s killer. In his last radio transmission, the first 007 mentioned Sixtine, a mysterious independent operative, whom Bond makes a point of meeting at a casino. Sixtine leads him to Corsican mobster Jean-Paul Scipio, a classic Bond villain who’s so obese that he can “pulverize his enemies using his own weight.” A fine storyteller, Horowitz employs all the tropes fans know and love (including an elegant explanation for the famous martini mandate, “shaken, not stirred”), but he also delivers a conclusion whose moral complexity will surprise anyone expecting an ending more in line with Fleming’s own. Bond aficionados will be well satisfied. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (Nov.)
From the Publisher
A fine storyteller, Horowitz employs all the tropes fans know and love (including an elegant explanation for the famous martini mandate, “shaken, not stirred”), but he also delivers a conclusion whose moral complexity will surprise anyone expecting an ending more in line with Fleming’s own.” — Publishers Weekly
The versatile Horowitz has written authorized books about Sherlock Holmes and others, and here spins a fragment of Fleming’s writing into a splendid prequel to the Bond canon. — Seattle Times
Horowitz’s trademark is a kind of gorgeous competence; a reader always feels utterly secure in the credibility of his narratives, however outlandish they get. Here, again, he handles a complicated plot with aplomb (and blessedly few explosions). Does he find a human being inside James Bond? He tries, and Sixtine is one of the best Bond girls ever written. — USA Today
Seattle Times
The versatile Horowitz has written authorized books about Sherlock Holmes and others, and here spins a fragment of Fleming’s writing into a splendid prequel to the Bond canon.
USA Today
Horowitz’s trademark is a kind of gorgeous competence; a reader always feels utterly secure in the credibility of his narratives, however outlandish they get. Here, again, he handles a complicated plot with aplomb (and blessedly few explosions). Does he find a human being inside James Bond? He tries, and Sixtine is one of the best Bond girls ever written.
USA Today
Horowitz’s trademark is a kind of gorgeous competence; a reader always feels utterly secure in the credibility of his narratives, however outlandish they get. Here, again, he handles a complicated plot with aplomb (and blessedly few explosions). Does he find a human being inside James Bond? He tries, and Sixtine is one of the best Bond girls ever written.
Sunday Express (London)
Tremendous fun… Horowitz has the discipline and skill of a first-class action writer.
Booklist (starred review)
This explosive adventure is Horowitz’s second Bond book, after Trigger Mortis (2015), and marks him as fully worthy to carry on the Bond tradition. Fleming would be pleased. Whether he is writing for adults or children, whether he is imagining his own characters or extending the lives of those created by others (Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle as well as Fleming), Horowitz always draws a crowd of eager readers.
NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
With all the ingredients the listener expects from a James Bond novel, this prequel to CASINO ROYALE introduces the younger James Bond as he earns his license to kill. Narrator Matthew Goode does a sterling job of taking the listener back to the 1950s and helps paint a picture of a postwar world full of steely spies, truly evil villains, and, of course, a beautiful woman. Listeners get a true sense of the time, and Goode’s characterizations help to conjure up images of opportunistic characters finding new openings in peacetime Europe. His narration helps create the feel of a traditional James Bond story, full of adventure combined with the reassurance of a predictable outcome. His pacing is a perfect match for this latest take on Ian Fleming’s legacy. K.J.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-08-21
Horowitz celebrates his return to the James Bond franchise (Trigger Mortis, 2015) by providing the story of 007's very first adventure in 1950.
Five years after World War II has ended, Bond slips into the Double-O ranks by committing his first duly licensed execution. Then, on the orders of M, he prepares to go after the people who made his promotion possible by dispatching the first 007. The assignment takes him to Marseilles, where his nameless predecessor was shot three times. Was the killer Joanne Brochet, aka Sixtine, the special ops-trained freelance agent who makes a living selling information to the highest bidder? Or was it Irwin Wolfe, the wealthy, aging American businessman Sixtine's taken up with? Or was he killed on the orders of scale-busting Corsican ganglord Jean-Paul Scipio, whose latest endeavors have made him worth his weight in heroin? Sixtine and Wolfe tell plausible stories about their presence in Marseilles, and Scipio does Bond the favor of not killing him on their first meeting. Setting his cap on getting closer (much closer) to Sixtine, Bond soon has her warbling her darkest secrets into his ear. He's made enough waves to attract unwanted attention, though, and soon enough he's hoping he'll get bailed out by CIA agent Reade Griffith. Horowitz unfolds this tale in prose as knowingly workmanlike as Ian Fleming's, and readers hungry for details of Bond's origin story will find out why he demands his martinis shaken, not stirred. But although he conscientiously hits all the obligatory notes, taking care not to outshine his master, there's nothing here that would make the unwary suspect how fiendishly inventive Horowitz can be when he's not laboring in Bond's shadow (The Word Is Murder, 2018, etc.).
Crisp, unpretentious, and bound to please the legion of fans for whom a world of Bond is never enough.
