While
making an emergency stopover in Rwanda, Modesty Blaise meets Giles
Pennyfeather, a slightly dotty medical practitioner with an almost
uncanny knack for healing his patients under the most dire of
conditions. During her time with Pennyfeather, Modesty serves as his
nurse — and later much more — and they soon find themselves accosted by
two vicious thugs, Adrian Chance and Jacko Muktar, who seek to shake
down the doctor for any information he may have gleaned from Novikov, a
Soviet defector with a lucrative secret. The problem is Novikov died
after escaping grueling torture at the hands of Chance, and Pennyfeather
may have inadvertently overheard him babble the one bit of information
vital to the plans of the thugs' master, a diminutive and icily evil
international criminal named Brunel. Of course Modesty kicks Chance and
Jacko's asses like a motherfucker, humiliating them mercilessly, but
lets them live after stranding them miles from civilization, a huge
error in judgement that comes back to kick her ass — along with the
collective ass of Pennyfeather and her right-hand man, Willie Garvin —
in a way that makes most of her previous brushes with death or worse
pale by comparison...
That's just the setup for a majorly
harrowing adventure, a story that puts both Modesty and Willie to some
serious tests of all of their many skills, and even if you're a fan of
the series and know for a fact that Willie is the co-lead in every book
in this series, there's a sequence that will have you on the edge of
your seat and believing along with Modesty that Willie has been taken
out of the picture once and for all; I mean, what else could you
possibly think if you witnessed your best friend engage in savage
combat, while strapped to a steel chair no less, and escaping from a
straight jacket as he gets thrown out of a plane flying at three
thousand feet, sans parachute? I won't say anymore, but Willie's missing
for about the next third of the book, and when he shows up in the nick
of time, his explanation of how he cheated death is so ludicrous and
over-the-top that you have believe every hilarious word of Willie's
account.
And speaking of hilarity, there's a great bit in which
Modesty and Willie decide to steal some vital stolen documents from
Brunel because their sale would lead to the inevitable sacking of their
pal Sir Gerald Tarrant from his position in the secret service, and they
just can't let that happen (plus Modesty wants to give the papers to
Sir Gerald as a surprise birthday present). After days of intense
scrutiny of the defenses in and around Brunel's London home our heroes
determine there's absolutely no way to break in without tripping all
manner of alarms and getting shot in the process at the very least, even
given their world class talents, so they come up with a plan both
brilliant in its simplicity and downright sidesplitting in its audacity.
I won't tell you how they pull it off, but it's so simple that you'd
never think of it, and when it happens you'll smack yourself in the head
for not thinking of something so obvious.
Simply put, the heroes
are in top form, the villains are among the most heinous human vermin
ever to (dis)grace the prose page, and the supporting characters,
Pennyfeather and the cruelly abused albino Lisa, are worthy of books in
and of themselves. And, no, I'm not going to tell you what the title
refers to. RECOMMENDED
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