A sampling of With a Mind to Kill reviews

With a Mind to a Kill, the third James Bond continuation novel by Anthony Horowitz, is out.

The new novel is set after the events of Ian Fleming’s last novel, The Man With the Golden Gun. Here are some excerpts from reviews. Some spoilers follow. So go no further if you don’t wish to view them.

JAMES OWEN, THE TIMES (LONDON): Horowitz’s novel “has Bond pretending that he succeeded in shooting M, for whom a fake funeral is staged. The plan is for 007 to ‘escape’ to Moscow, like the real-life traitor George Blake.”

“Bond in the USSR is a neat conceit, but it’s not an escapist one. Although some of the quite short novel takes place in a swish hotel, shabby Moscow in the 1960s has little of the glamour that distinguishes the character (and not just in the films) from what George Lazenby might have termed ‘the other guys’. “

KIRKUS REVIEWS: “Horowitz completes his James Bond trilogy—begun in Trigger Mortis (2015) and Forever and a Day (2018)—by providing what would be the nonpareil British spy’s final adventure if only all those other earlier scribes hadn’t preceded him at the feast….Not nearly as ingenious as Horowitz’s meta-whodunits but well above average among post–Ian Fleming Bonds.”

AJAY CHOWDHURY, MI6 HQ.COM: “We live in an age where the tale of the movie Bond wags the dog of literary Bond. For the person given carte blanche to renew Bond’s literary licence for a solo mission every few years, they must conceive of a genuinely novelistic conceit that surprises and delights the wizened reader. It can be a thankless mission….Horowitz’s tale is dense with detail on period Moscow and the verisimilitude of psychological warfare.”