Diamonds Are Forever: A James Bond Novel

Rating:
Summary: As good as usual
Review: Without the meglomaniac villain, but fine writing, excellent pacing and gripping action...Fleming does it again.

Rating:
Summary: Bond's first and (as far as I know) only gay assassins?
Review: Yes, film fans, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd do appear in this book; and although, as always, the book is vastly different from the movie, it is easy to see some of the points of inspiration (the exchange in the desert; the ship at the end).
The characters are different also. If you've read the books or any of the reviews I've written on the first 3, you know the characterization variences of Bond himself (He actually gets beaten up in this one; though he does have his first superhuman moments in "DAF", beating the tar out of two adversaries on two seperate occasions), but some of the supporting characters bear notice:
Tiffany Case is in no way the ditz portrayed in the movie. In the book she's a "hard-boiled broad" as Spillaine or Chandler might put it.
Wint and Kidd are more thuggish and not the Dickensian villains most are familiar with.
Felix Leiter with hook and wooden leg returns!
Finally, SPECTRE has nothing to do with this novel save for the fact that the ghost town hideout of one of the primary antagonists is called "Spectreville." And NONE of the bad guys are our boy Ernst (You're gonna have to wait a few novels for him).
The story is basically about 007's efforts to close a diamond smuggling pipeline to the United States (And not a doomsday device lazer beam in sight!)
I did take some points off from this novel because, toward the end, Fleming seemed to develop a penchant for run-on sentences ("He went into the room and lit a cigarette and sat down and started to write. . . ."); but this is just something that I, as an english major, found grating.
All in all, enjoyable.