Hey look, I finished another book from my latest Ambitious Read List! Even though I just wrote about Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot last month, I can’t revel in this literary moral victory because I actually started this book…way too long ago. My father-in-law passed me this book along with its predecessor in the Jonathan Hemlock series The Eiger Sanction a few years ago and now I’m finally done with them (and wishing Trevanian had gotten around to writing a few more).

As this 1973 novel picks up Jonathan Hemlock is out of the sanction game until he’s framed by the British version of the shadowy organization he used to work for and blackmailed into infiltrating a sex club for the powerful in order to return some videos of politicians in compromising situations. Along the way he meets a wannabe Irish spy who he kinda sorta falls for, but she’s also wrapped up in some of these shenanigans so it gets a bit dicey.

So, why did it take me so long to read this book? Honestly, it’s a little boring in the offing. It also lacked that magic thing that keeps driving you on to read the next chapter. I don’t know what that is, but ‘Salem’s Lot had it and Loo Sanction just didn’t. At the same time, I like this character so I wanted to see where he wound up, so I kept returning to it every now and then and eventually got to the point where I was fully absorbed. There are also some particularly nasty moments in this book that were hard to get through and too much on many fronts. Supposedly this was written as a satire of the James Bond movies, but kitchen utensils never seemed so awful in a Bond film.

To go along with the satire threat, there was an element to this book that I picked up on that I didn’t see in the previous entry: it’s intentionally poking fun at the ridiculousness of rich and powerful people. Everyone with any kind of power in this novel also has some over-the-top trait which our hero bristles at because, even though he’s cultured and well-to-d0, he’s a kid from the streets at heart. For example, the Vicar who runs England’s sanction department winks like a maniac. Maxwell Strange, the man who runs the sex club, would be considered a health freak even by today’s standards and Amazing Grace is a surprisingly short woman who spends most of her time walking around naked. These might feel like odd traits at first — especially if you look at them through the frame of the Bond films — but after reading about more quirks than an episode of New Girl, I started to catch on.

At the end of the day, while this one didn’t exactly kick off with my interest, it certainly garnered it halfway through as I wound up reading the last 150 pages or so during flights to and from Indiana. Also, I assume if you’re a faster and more dedicated reader than I am, you’d get through the early parts faster and not dwell on them as I tend to.

Looking at the line-up for the Reading List, I’ve already 86ed the book of essays about comics and think I’m going to move on to either The Dante Club or the Freddy Krueger book because it’s almost fall and Halloween’s around the corner!