A review by mpetruce
Carte Blanche, by Jeffery Deaver

3.0

I remember reading a review a while back that this newish Bond novel was one of the better non-Fleming Bond novels, so I gave it a try. I enjoyed it on the whole. Some of the Bond cliches I rolled my eyes at turned out to be red herrings, which was neat. I had a small problem with two situations. There were two sections of the book, sort of near the end, with the typical "How will Bond get out of this one?" Well, Deaver gets him out of it by cheating with a flashback to a part of the book where we noticed nothing of what ultimately ended up getting him out of it. What's unfortunate is that the book does change point-of-view from Bond to others. I could almost accept the cheat if Deaver had done that, but he didn't. The Bond villain isn't the classic maniacal world-domination Bond villain, and I had to wonder about the motivation being worthy of such villainous villainy, but overall they were neat.

The audio narration is unabridged and done very smoothly by Toby Stephens. I am used to Simon Vance's readings of the Fleming Bond novels, and he's hard to beat.