As a Bond literary aficionado, I have read all of the James Bond continuation novels, the 14 by John Gardner, 6 by Raymond Benson and 1 each by Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver and William Boyd along with the five Young Bond novels by Charley Higson and all seven of the film novelizations by Christopher Wood, Gardner and Benson. All of them are entertaining novels in their own right, but SOLO is only entry, aside from COLONEL SUN, that flows seamlessly from the Ian Fleming canon. Most of the critics of this novel, those who claim it lacks the charm, the panache and the action of a Bond novel, have probably not read a Fleming Bond adventure for a very long time, if ever. Their vision of James Bond comes from the films and most of the films have little connection to their Ian Fleming literary origin. Indeed, the only James Bond actor who came close to what Ian Fleming envisioned was Timothy Dalton and he was rejected by mainstream audiences for lacking humor and replaced by the more charming and less brooding Pierce Brosnan. Dalton is how I imagined James Bond while reading this novel.The Fleming Bond novels are composites of three elements: snobbery, sadism and travelogue and this book has all three in abundance. When these books were first published back in the 1950s, they were flayed by critics as pornography and read under the blanket with a flashlight by adolescent males and on trains and airplanes by adults looking to escape the conformist postwar era of the common man. James Bond lives the high life and enjoys the sensations of a good whiskey, a dry vodka martini shaken with a slice of lemon, a thick steak with a salad dressed with own vinaigrette recipe and the smooth body of a naked woman in his bed. You experience all of this in SOLO as you travel from London in the late 1960s to the heart of darkness in an African war zone to the grim, violent streets of America's capital. SOLO is a travelogue in the same fashion as such Fleming novels as LIVE AND LET DIE, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. Indeed, I would recommend that the reader read all three of those Fleming novels before reading SOLO, as there are references in SOLO to things in those books and they will ease the reader into the style and texture of the real literary James Bond. The first two will also establish the relationship between James Bond and Felix Leiter, who is a far more memorable character in the Fleming novels than he is in the EON films.The plot is a richly complex story with some unexpected surprises and an occasional shocker, but it is a spy story more in line with Graham Greene and Len Deighton than Tom Clancy or Mission Impossible. This is not a high concept Bond adventure in which the nuclear weapon is ticking down to zero. Only four of Ian Fleming's 20 James Bond novels and stories had a high concept plot of that type. In the rest, the villain was doing something much more mundane, such as raising funds for Soviet espionage operations, smuggling diamonds out of Africa for the Mob, embarrassing the British Secret Service with a sex and suicide scandal, smuggling drugs into England, burning down a motel for the insurance money, enticing Japanese to commit suicide or sabotaging the Jamaican sugar fields for Castro. The main villain, Kobus Breed, falls into this category and while his evil ambitions are limited, he is a memorable, well drawn character, well grounded in the real world. I think Fleming would have approved. Boyd has triumphed in SOLO and brought the real James Bond back, free from the image that 24 films from the last 50 years have created.