Cold Fall

An appropriate title adorns the slackest James Bond novel in ages. Here, 007 is assigned to find the persons behind the bombing of an airliner. His five-year search, 1990-1994, leads him to minor royalty, Italian mobsters, a power-crazed general in Idaho and the Children of the Last Days, an underground neo-fascist terrorist organization. Those are sturdy enough timbers, but to build this novel, Gardner joins them with paste-prose so inane it's laughable. Of one villain, it's said: ""He's the kind of monster who strangles cats just for the hell of it."" Some time after Bond's true love dies, a new paramour comments, while holding her predecessor's ashes in an urn: ""Why don't I put her in the bedroom. She's from your past and I don't mind sharing you with her."" Perfunctory attempts to increase readers' pulse rates through a kidnapping of M, a personal betrayal of Bond and other means can't disguise the fact that, in his 14th Bond adventure, Gardner is just going numbly through the paces. (June)