With a Mind to Kill: the action-packed Richard and Judy Book Club Pick (James Bond 007)

Product Information

Anthony Horowitz has written another solid Bond novel. This is more of a 2 1/2 star book. Horowitz's writing is as griping as it usually is and I loved the way all his Bond books are set within the Fleming universe. But this one coming straight after The Man with the Golden Gun was a little hard to get into due to the plot being a little preposterous. Most Bond plots are a little preposterous but this one really pushed the envelope. It was a good read and a nice end to Horowitz's trilogy. This doesn’t really feel that way. Is government agent by nature, in days before HR practice has catch-on on the suffering of the work force.

Whenever I read a James Bond novel, I always wonder which version of 007 I will see. Once I understood the timeline of WITH A MIND TO KILL, which wraps up Anthony Horowitz’s Bond trilogy, I had my answer. 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. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

With a Mind to Kill

Bond was being abused and he thoughts of quitting. He should quit. Let someone else who hasn’t suffered so much to carry on this work. Being good at his work should make him feel appreciate and treasured as a good employee.

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. Bain is flattered by the romantic attentions of Rachel Hardcastle, a successful concert pianist and sophisticated, attractive woman. Then her husband turns up dead, and Bain becomes the prime suspect in his murder. 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? Some of this was very painful to read though it was true to the time and what men and women expected of interactions. Sad A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Guardian Angel (2005) • " For Your Eyes Only, James" (2006) • Secret Servant (2006) • " Moneypenny's First Date With Bond" (2006) • Final Fling (2008) So well written and has the depth that sometimes Fleming didn’t bother with. The 60s Cold War setting works perfectly and there is that sense that Bond is struggling with the idea that his career may be coming to an end and wants to prove himself. But there also an understanding that it is his 00 status that defines him and he can’t imagine a different future.

By the time you read this review it may well be redundant. The publishers kindly sent me a review copy earlier in the year, but – thanks mainly, I suspect, to the Spanish postal service – it never arrived. They couriered a second copy, but the result is this review published almost a fortnight after the book was first released. WaMtK is a sequel to Fleming's final original novel The Man With the Golden Gun (James Bond #13 - 1965) and can also be read as an imagined end to the canon. That is the reason for my Ambiguous Ending Alert™, about which it would be a spoiler to say anything more. 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. It is M’s funeral. One man is missing from the graveside: the traitor who pulled the trigger and who is now in custody, accused of M’s murder – James Bond. My only real criticsim is the author's constant references to a huge amount of previous Bond adventures by Ian Fleming. Some of these are essential to the story, but many are unnecessary & somewhat laboured. Other Bond continuation novelist like John Gardner & Raymond Benson had the same problem. These endless references to 007's past did irritate me at times, but the last four chapters of With A Mind To Kill are so sublime that (once again!) I'll forgive him.It’s almost uncanny how well Mr. Horowitz summons Bond’s mindset . . . Yet this Bond also feels the winds of change: 'He had his licence to kill. But was it possible that in this new, more questioning age, that licence might have expired?' A drop of retro pleasures, a pinch of things to come; shaken, not stirred." — Wall Street Journal