With a Mind to Kill: A James Bond Novel

by Anthony Horowitz

Overview

Internationally bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s third James Bond novel, after Forever and a Day.

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.

Behind the Iron Curtain, a group of former Smersh agents want to use the British spy in an operation that will change the balance of world power. Bond is smuggled into the lion's den - but whose orders is he following, and will he obey them when the moment of truth arrives?

In a mission where treachery is all around and one false move means death, Bond must grapple with the darkest questions about himself. But not even he knows what has happened to the man he used to be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063078413
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	22,370
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

ANTHONY HOROWITZ is the author of the US bestselling Magpie Murders and The Word is Murder, and one of the most prolific and successful writers in the English language; he may have committed more (fictional) murders than any other living author. His novel Trigger Mortis features original material from Ian Fleming. His most recent Sherlock Holmes novel, Moriarty, is a reader favorite; and his bestselling Alex Rider series for young adults has sold more than 19 million copies worldwide. As a TV screenwriter, he created both Midsomer Murders and the BAFTA-winning Foyle’s War on PBS. Horowitz regularly contributes to a wide variety of national newspapers and magazines, and in January 2014 was awarded an OBE.

Editorial Reviews

03/28/2022

Bestseller Horowitz’s solid third James Bond novel (after 2018’s Forever and a Day) picks up after the final Ian Fleming novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, in which the Russians captured Bond, brainwashed him, and programmed him to kill M, the head of the British secret service. The British stage M’s funeral and imprison Bond to fool the Russians into believing Bond succeeded in the assassination as part of a plot to get 007 into Russia to discover what its intelligence organizations are planning. The Russians oblige by snatching Bond from police custody and sending him to Leningrad, where he falls under the “care” of Colonel Boris, a mind control expert, and Katya Leonova, an icy, Communist technocrat. The Russians have a high-profile mission for Bond, which leads to a genuinely thrilling climax, though readers should be prepared for a somewhat predictable plot and an abrupt ending. Horowitz displays a thorough knowledge of Bondean tropes, captures the dreariness of Khrushchev-era Russia, and deepens 007 by allowing him a certain ambiguity about his profession. This heartfelt homage is sure to please fans of the original Bond books. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (May)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2021

In Barclay's Take Your Breath Away, Andrew Mason is suspected of murdering wife Brie after she disappears, and further complications arise when someone resembling her shows up at the couple's old address before vanishing again (100,000-copy first printing). First seen in Brown's 2021 New York Times best seller, Arctic Storm Rising, former U.S. Air Force officer Nick Flynn now faces a Countdown to Midnight, with Midnight the code name for a secret project between Russia and Iran involving a lethal new weapon (125,000-copy first printing). In Burke's Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, novelist Aaron Holland is guided by the ghost of his recently deceased daughter when his do-gooding efforts draw him into a shady crowd that includes a former Klansman, a not-so-saintly minister, some scary fake-evangelical bikers, and a murderer (100,000-copy first printing). In Carr's In the Blood, a Mossad operative known to former Navy SEAL James Reece is killed in a plane explosion (she herself had just completed a targeted assassination), but searching for the culprit might mean walking into a trap (200,000-copy first printing). In Horowitz's third James Bond outing, as yet Untitled, 007 is starting to question his role as the Cold War wears on but agrees to act as a double agent so that he can infiltrate a newly hatched Soviet intelligence organization (50,000-copy first printing). Unfolding 15 years after events in Iles's "Natchez Burning" trilogy, Southern Man reintroduces Penn Cage, back in action as shots fired at a Bienville music festival nearly kill his daughter, a militant Black group takes responsibility for the torching of antebellum mansions, and a close friend is shot to death by a county deputy (200,000-copy first printing). Her career stumbling, lawyer Nicole Muller gladly complies when she's asked by the exclusive women's professional group Panthera Leo to Please Join Us, but as author McKenzie soon reveals, membership comes at a price (60,000-copy first printing). Demoted from the elite Hawks police unit for being too keen on uncovering state corruption, Meyer's stalwart detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido await transfer from Cape Town to dull duty in Stellenbosch when an anonymous warning and a missing-student assignment reveal that The Dark Flood of corruption they knew was there is worse than they imagined. On a business trip with her new, much younger husband, Pavone's latest heroine, Ariel Price, can't enjoy her Two Nights in Lisbon; she awakens one morning to find her spouse missing and begins to realize that she hardly knows him (200,000-copy first printing). Edgar-nominated for The Impossible Fortress and also the editor behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Rekulak returns with Hidden Pictures, featuring a nanny whose five-year-old charge draws increasingly creepy and sophisticated pictures (shown in the text) hinting at a long-ago murder (250,000-copy first printing). A woman lies murdered, surrounded by Dark Objects that include the book How To Process a Murder by forensics expert Laughton Rees, who's of course immediately called to the scene; the latest from "Sanctus" author Toyne (50,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal

2022-04-12
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.

Brought back home in 1964 after executing Francisco Scaramanga in Jamaica in order to fake the assassination of M, his longtime superior in the Secret Intelligence Service, Bond performs so well that everyone who knows the actual position of Adm. Sir Miles Messervy—perhaps 50 people all told—is fooled into thinking that he’s dead. This fraud only lays the groundwork for Bond’s real job: to continue pretending that he remains indoctrinated by the Soviets aligned with Scaramanga in order to infiltrate the ranks of Stalnaya Ruka, a cabal of officers in the USSR who are clearly up to no good. Accordingly, he lets himself be abducted out from under the English officers who clearly hate him for killing Sir Miles, though this deception is trickier than it looks. Whisked off to Leningrad, he’s drugged and interrogated by his old nemesis Col. Boris, who’s far from convinced that Bond has set queen and country aside for the Soviet Union. The colonel assigns clinical psychiatrist Katya Leonova to stick close to Bond, becoming his friend, his confidante, and, if necessary, his lover. From this point on the plot proceeds in a much straighter line, though Horowitz can’t resist several additional twists, the most notable of them the identity of the target Bond’s new masters send him to East Berlin to eliminate.

Not nearly as ingenious as Horowitz’s meta-whodunits but well above average among post–Ian Fleming Bonds.

Kirkus Reviews