Seafire: A James Bond thriller

Description

James Bond is back in action, with the stunning Flicka von Grusse at his side and his licence to kill renewed once more. His target is Sir Maxwell Tarn: a businessman whose legitimate empire spans the globe, whose wealth is uncountable, who also deals in illegal weapons on a breathtaking scale. But even Bond is unprepared for the speed of events, as a sting operation in a Cambridge hotel leads rapidly to an assassination in Spain, a fugitive in Israel and neo-Nazi plotters in Germany. Bond finally catches up with Tarn in Puerto Rico where his prey becomes his captor. Can he escape in time to stop Tarn?

After Colonel Sun (1968) by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner was the next writer to be asked to write further adventures of James Bond. He wrote, like Fleming, fourteen Bond books, plus novelisations of the films GoldenEye and Licence to Kill, from 1981 to 1996. Before becoming an author of fiction in the early 1960s John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer, a journalist and, for a short time, a priest in the Church of England. 'Probably the biggest mistake I ever made,' he says. 'I confused the desire to please my father with a vocation which I soon found I did not have.' In all, Gardner had fifty-five novels to his credit - many of them bestsellers. John Gardner died in 2007.