THE SPY WHO HATED ME

In the fifth installment of this series, the author returns to the strange but hilarious plight of James Flynn, a patient at a psychiatric institution in Los Angeles. He suffers from delusion—despite growing up in Burbank, California, he believes he is a British agent in His Majesty’s Secret Service and that the hospital that houses him is really a clandestine redoubt providing him with a cover. Despite the inarguable insanity of these beliefs, he is an inexplicably talented man who has in fact become famous for saving the world repeatedly, making him a delightfully complicated hero, drawn with great comic effect. When Caitlyn Valentine (a CIA agent with whom he enjoyed a romantic connection) stops returning his phone calls, he assumes she’s in grave danger and tracks her down to London, accompanied by his psychiatric nurse (aptly named Sancho). He finds Caitlyn posing as a bodyguard for Oleg Ivanov, a nefarious Russian billionaire who owns a lab devoted to creating dangerous computer viruses and who plans to take over the world. This volume in the series is more prone to slapstick humor than its predecessors, as in this exchange between James and Sancho in which James complains about traffic rules in London: “‘Driving on the left feels rather wrong.’ ‘Yeah, but it’s right.’ ‘Right?’ Flynn started to veer. ‘No! Left! Left!’” The inventive premise of the series has lost some of its novelty, and, as a consequence, some of its comic sparkle. Still, James remains a memorable protagonist, one whose principal strength as a faux secret agent might be his mental health issues, which make him profoundly unpredictable. Despite lacking some of the luster of the earlier entries in the series, this stands as an endlessly entertaining novel.

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