Devil May Care – Lair of the Green Knight

Hey there…

Even James Bond would probably have a hard time chasing down The Chameleon. Haggai Carmon’s agent Dan Gordon chases The Chameleon around the world by following money and clues, eventually uncovering a terror plot that is much larger than any single person.

Do you think of international finance or fraud investigation as being interesting? Neither did I. How about a fraud investigator for the US Department of Justice with ties to Mossad? Ok, now we’re getting warmer. Now what happens if we add in a terror plot with sleeper cells in the United States? Now I’m hooked.

For the last 20 years, author Haggai Carmon has held a number of intriguing jobs: international attorney, undercover intelligence operative for a number of U.S. federal agencies, husband, father, and author of the Triple Identity and The Red Syndrome, the first two Dan Gordon novels. Now with The Chameleon Conspiracy, he’s done an amazing job weaving the complex areas of money laundering and fraud investigation with international intrigue to make a compelling, page-turning story.

Agent Dan Gordon, over the course of a number of months, travels from the United States to Australia, Europe, and the Middle East to try and track down a mysterious Albert C. Ward III who bilked money from a number of investors throughout the US. His investigation eventually finds him working with the FBI, CIA and Mossad as they attempt to discover just how deep the conspiracy goes…

I’m a huge spy novel fan, but have to admit I haven’t read any for a while. The last one I read was Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, a James Bond novel set during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. The Chameleon Conspiracy takes place in the present political climate, using our post 9/11 world to take us to dangerous hubs of terrorism and anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere.

It’s nearly impossible to review this book without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that if you’re looking for an entertaining, but intricate spy novel, I can’t recommend The Chameleon Conspiracy enough. Now I have to go find the other Dan Gordon books by Carmon to catch up! Find it at your favorite local bookseller or online retailer.

–Fitz

p.s. Click below to check out this and other Haggai Carmon books at Amazon!

Hi all…

I am a huge James Bond fan. Was a big fan of the books not long after I was introduced to Dr. No as a kid. Ian Fleming wasn’t the greatest author in the world, but his world was so vivid that I didn’t really care. I devoured all of the novels I could find and eventually read all of the originals from Casino Royale to The Man with the Golden Gun.

So when I saw that another author had picked up the mantle, I was interested. Sebastian Faulks is not an author I’m familiar with, but when I saw that he was picking up where Ian Fleming left off… I was intrigued.

Faulks is not the first author to pick up Fleming’s world. John Gardner between 1981 and 1996 wrote fourteen James Bond novels. I think I read the first four or five before losing interest. By that point, the movies had started to lose their steam. And I never read any of Raymond Benson‘s novels when he picked up where Gardner left off.

This book is set during the Cold War. It travels around the world, from London, to Paris, to Tehran and Cold War Russia. It doesn’t fail anything on the Cold War travel docket. Faulks chose not to update the character, but rather to keep it in line with the original Fleming novels.

And this book doesn’t fail to impress. It was a heck of a quick read. I polished it off in about 4 sittings. At 278 pages, it went fast.

I’ll provide the Amazon summary here:

“Devil May Care is a masterful continuation of the James Bond legacy–an electrifying new chapter in the life of the most iconic spy of literature and film, written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth on May 28, 1908.

An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into.

Bond finds a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava. He will need her help in a life-and-death struggle with his most dangerous adversary yet, as a chain of events threaten to lead to global catastrophe. A British airliner goes missing over Iraq. The thunder of a coming war echoes in the Middle East. And a tide of lethal narcotics threatens to engulf a Great Britain in the throes of the social upheavals of the late sixties.

Picking up where Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War in a story of almost unbearable pace and tension. Devil May Care not only captures the very essence of Fleming’s original novels but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times.”

This sums it up nicely. If you’re interested in Bond — Classic Bond or otherwise — this book is for you. An enthusiastic 4/4 for this book.

What are you reading?

–Fitz

Tag: Devil May Care

Book Review: The Chameleon Conspiracy by Haggai Carmon

Devil May Care – James Bond is Back in the Cold War…

Related articles by Zemanta