Cover by J.T. Lindroos. Coming Oct. 21 from Betimes Books. Pre-order eBook version here. Trade paperback soon to follow.
Here's the pitch:
Ian Fleming and Hector Lassiter: Novelists, ex-spies and at last, lions in winter.
It’s 1963, and the future isn’t what it used to be.
Lassiter, crime novelist and screenwriter, senses the culture is slowly but surely shouldering him aside. Yet his slightly younger friend, British thriller writer Ian Fleming, stands on the verge of unimaginable success as his long-running series of James Bond novels at last makes its way to the Silver Screen.
But fortune has come too late for an ailing, deeply troubled Ian, who finds it harder to live the high-life necessary to feed his 007 page-turners: he is a dying man and ex-spymaster pining for a last grand adventure.
Enter Playboy Magazine and its offer to stake Hector to trek Ian on a research trip to Japan for his next Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, then onto Istanbul for the filming of From Russia With Love.
As Hector dogs Ian’s heels through the far-flung cities of the world, he discovers Fleming is secretly determined to right their one shared intelligence failure: “Operation Flea” — the key to a bio-weapon of terrifying scope that could bring Britain and America to their knees.
With cameos by Sean Connery, Robert Shaw and the death-obsessed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, Craig McDonald again deftly mixes fact and fiction for a darkly seductive historical romp through the mid-20th Century.
This is the penultimate Hector Lassiter literary thriller in the Edgar/Anthony-awards nominated series BookPage declared “wildly inventive” and The Chicago Tribune calls “most unusual, and readable crime fiction to come along in years.”
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