ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE
by Ian Fleming
A new publisher (making its first hard-cover appearance) for James Bond who has been on what amounts to a sabbatical (routine work), a tracer of his old opponent Blofeld, and the organization he masterminds, Spectre reborn. Bond has gotten a little soft (he even thinks of "nest-building") but the story gains momentum on a blood-stained ski piste in the Alps. Sometimes it doesn't quite seem like the old Bond (imagine him saying- "What a dear girl Mary was")- he's lost a little of that saturnine, adamantine authority. But between Dr. No (on the screen) and that Harvard undergraduate parody- Alligator, he has probably acquired a brand new readership.