For Special Services: A James Bond thriller

Description

Official, original James Bond from a writer described by Len Deighton as a 'master storyteller'. In this heart-stopping thriller, James Bond teams up with CIA agent Cedar Leiter, to investigate a dangerous criminal, suspected of reviving the notorious organisation SPECTRE. The organisation was believed to have been disbanded years earlier following the death of its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, at the hands of Bond (in You Only Live Twice), but it seems that this is far from true. Bond discovers that the revitalised SPECTRE has the most devastating, world-threatening plans: to gain control of America's military space satellite network.

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.

A must for James Bond fans. * Bradford Telegraph & Argus * This is a thrilling read. * The Catholic Herald *