Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Pure reading pleasure!, 5 Jan 2007
As a 41-year-old mother of two, I am not exactly this book's target audience, but I thought it was pretty close to perfect. I've read the other two Young Bond books, but the author has really hit his stride with this one. It's exciting and cleverly plotted, with more than enough action to satisfy every boy (and surely every girl) who reads it and also enough hints at how Bond ends up the man we know from the Fleming books to intrigue adults. I gulped it down in two sittings and now envy all those who have yet to enjoy escaping into it. Surely no one with a pulse would fail to enjoy it.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Young Bond gets smart, 28 Jan 2007
Charlie Higson's Double or Die is the pivot on which the Young Bond series turns. Double or Die both pulls from past books and points to the future. Where SilverFin infused Bond with his fearless instinct and Blood Fever developed his brawn, Double or Die works his mind (and ours). This Young Bond novel is psychologically more complex than its predecessors. Indeed, with its many scenes set in tombs and tunnels, Double or Die drips with Freudian undercurrents.
Thematically, Double or Die is an adventure of the mind. Bond and his band of friends must decrypt puzzles and clues contained within a mysterious cipher sent by a kidnapped professor. Higson plays the motif throughout as references to skulls and the brain abound. Where Blood Fever was bright and expansive, Double or Die is dark and contained. While this could make it a lesser Bondian adventure for some, the smaller scale allows Higson to work in greater texture and detail, making Double or Die the most vivid and visual of all the Young Bond novels to date. It's also the Young Bond novel that showcases its 1930s setting the best as Higson peppers the book with delightful period slang and long forgotten brand names.
The body count in Double or Die is lower than Blood Fever, but Higson doesn't skimp on the gore, especially during the terrific climax on the London Docklands and inside an abandon pneumatic railway (wonderful Bondian locations both). The fact that the henchmen comes away from each encounter with Young Bond missing another body part is grisly good fun and pure Bond. Higson adds a surprising postscript to this book that is unlike anything that has yet appeared in a Young Bond novel. I will leave it to the reader to discover it, and decide whether it belongs in the Young Bond universe.
Absence of a Bond Girl (or any female for that matter) is missed during the first two thirds of the book, but the arrival of the perfectly named Kelly Kelly and her "Monstrous Regiment" (a sort of cockney street urchin version of Pussy Galore's Flying Circus) is a highlight of the final third. Higson again toys with romance, but one gets a sense he's nervous about offending the sensibilities of his youngest male readers. At the risk of getting a schoolyard beating, I'm hoping for a more developed romance at some point in the Young Bond series.
The measure of any James Bond continuation novel, and novelist, is how they compare with Fleming. Charlie Higson matched Fleming last year with the excellent Blood Fever. Now, with the complex and thrilling Double or Die, Higson appears to be steering the Young Bond series toward even higher literary achievement.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Double as good as the last two, 5 Mar 2007
DOUBLE OR DIE is in my opinion, the best book in the series so far. Charlie Higson is improving every book and if the improvement between BLOOD FEVER and DOUBLE OR DIE is anything to go by, I cannot wait to read the fourth in the series.
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