'Ingenious' new Bond captures fun, if not power, of originals

Eighth author to bring back the famous British spy breathes new life into the novels

For James Bond the phrase "You Only Live Twice" has proved a serious underestimate: Anthony Horowitz is the eighth author to have resuscitated 007 since Ian Fleming's death. Fleming's estate has made a canny choice in Horowitz, who proved in his Conan Doyle pastiche The House of Silk - which saw Sherlock Holmes battling a VIP paedophile ring - that he can convincingly replicate another author's world without sticking too slavishly to his template.

In Trigger Mortis Horowitz has had the ingenious idea of showing us Bond in the act of doing something which we know he does a lot, but Fleming would never have dreamed of writing: all the "It's not you, it's me" business of dumping his conquests. The novel opens two weeks after the action of Fleming's Goldfinger (1959), a book which ended with Bond triumphantly overcoming the lesbian predilections of the trapeze artist-cum-cat burglar Pussy Galore. But in the Fleming canon, Pussy goes the way of such predecessors as Tiffany Case, Solitaire and Honeychile Rider, and has disappeared without explanation, despite Bond's avowed passion for her, by the start of the next novel.