I enjoy rereading all the Modesty Blaise novels, but two of the characters who fall in love in this book were an old married couple in the last one. While the exploits of Modesty and her partner, Willie Garvin, are exciting, this has one of the best fight scenes in all the Modesty novels. In fact, she has a scary encounter with a swordsman AND Willie meets up with a gorilla-like sadist who had battered him almost to the death during a previous encounter.
Stuck in the middle of the desert at an archeological dig taken over by criminals when a treasure trove is discovered, Modesty and Willie have to save the young lovers, a blind dowser and an uptight parapsychologist, and the enslaved archeologists. One of the criminal masterminds, Gabriel, is an old foe. The gorilla fighter, teasingly called King Kong for being super-strong and having no sense of pain, toys with Willie, promising a repeat of their last encounter which took Willie a year to recuperate.
Willie knows he’ll die if another fight ensues, so Modesty takes a blade to defeat a master fencer and rescues the young lovers and the archeologists. She and Willie escape on foot across the desert, but his old sparring partner catches up with them when Modesty’s wound becomes infected and she becomes too feverish to travel.
While I wondered why Modesty felt it necessary to fence the master topless, I suppose it could have been to distract her opponent. They call it pulp for a reason. I don’t usually worry about our intrepid duo, but this time, they both had severe handicaps, and I worried what kind of shape they’d be in if they survived.
One of the most impressive traits of Modesty is her own brand of morality. While she abides by the law and never kills without good reason, in this novel she confronts a billionaire who laughs at the law when caught red-handed. He boasts that with his criminal resources and wealth, he’ll have her killed before she can bring him to justice. Modesty decides not to wait and takes matters of justice into her own hands.