NOBODY LIVES FOREVER. - A James Bond novel by Gardner, John

New York, 1986, Putnams. First US edition , hard bound in dust jacket, VG/ VG- ( DJ has several small chips & tears at head & tail of sprine). 6x9, 301 pp. 5th in the new James Bond series. Many have tried; nonbe has succeded. Not even James Bond's most desperate adversaries, not even all the global resources of a SMERSH or a SPECTRE under the diabolical leadership of Ernst Stavro Blofeld or, in more recent days, Colonel Tamil Rahani, have managed to defeat 007.But is it because no one has discovered 007's soft spot?It all starts innocently enough: The suave James Bond is on leave in Europe, motoring across France in his Bentley Mulsanne Turbo on his way to visit friends in Italy, then to a sanitorium in Austria, where his devoted housekeeper, May, is convalescing from a serious illness. Soon enough, however, ominous events begin to take place: Sudden death strikes at least four people who come close to Bond during his journey. Coincidences? Perhaps. But is Bond's encounter with the wealthy and beauteous brown-eyed Sukie Tempesta, known as "La Principessa," or her cohort, the equally charming "Nannie" Norwich, who heads the world's only female bodyguard service, truly a coincidence?Then a phone call comes, from May's doctor at the sanitorium: Bond's housekeeper has been kidnapped, and with her a familiar visitor, M's secretary and Bond's longtime (if discreet) admirer, Miss Moneypenny.Soon enough Bond realizes what has happened. There is a contract out in the espionage world: ten million Swiss francs for James Bond's head literally severed and delivered on a silver charger. The donor: none other than Tamil Rahani himself, who was last seen (in John Gardner's Role of Honor) plummeting from an airship into Lake Geneva.Nobody Lives Forever is vintage Bond and the best of the bestselling cycle of James Bond novels created by John Gardner, which began with License Renewed. Told at a breakneck pace, marked by unforeseen pitfalls and twisting turns that confound Bond as much as his readers, it propels us from the winding roads of the Tyrolean Alps to a shark-defended island off the coast of Key West and a locked room that contains but a slant-bladed device long favored by head-severers: the guillotine.Filled with double-crosses that will throw off even the most seasoned Bond hand, this is high-tech, high-tension thriller writing at its very best, proving once and for all that Nobody Lives Forever.