Lets get one thing out of the way! This is not a James Bond adventure. If the "hero" of this tale was called John Smith, you wouldn't even compare it to the Fleming books or even think about 007 when reading this. The "hero" here shows great empathy towards others, especially towards women, with whom he is a perfect and thoughtful gentleman. He has qualms about killing and avoids it as much as possible. In fact the body count at the end is quite low. He's not very competent either, failing numerous times in his "mission", letting allies die, always being outgunned and only surviving by being saved by a far more badass female south african agent. The villain has a weird, bizarre and disgusting fascination with death, more accurately with cadaver decomposition. How charming! His henchman is a tall, lanky, awkward irishman whose main or only trait is that he's smart and has a flock of hair over his "cold blue eyes". Oh and the cherry on top is that much of the latter part of the book is spent on the luxurious and exotic location of... an industrial dump. Yes, in this 007 adventure you can read all about decomposing corpses, decomposing trash, how its burned, how it it smells, how the seagulls hover over it, oh such elegance! Just what we've come to expect of James Bond!
The main problem is not the modern setting, the different character or even the lack of understanding of the legacy and franchise. The issue is that even taken as a stand-alone story with some guy named James Bond, this i s just not a very good book. The writing is stiff, the pacing surprisingly slow even with the copious amount of action and the stakes are not high enough to care. The characters all fall flat, the villains are disgusting but not in a good, interesting way and this James Bond guy is as boring as can be.
Its not offensively bad. Its just offensively average and as a James Bond adventure insultingly horrible.
(Goodreads)
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