Death in the Face

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 senses the culture is slowly but surely shouldering him aside. Yet his friend Ian 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. A dying man, Ian finds it harder to live the high-life necessary to feed his 007 page-turners, but the ex-spymaster pines for a last grand adventure. As Hector follows 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, 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."