Casino Royale

Le Chiffre is a businessman with expensive tastes - and SMERSH's chief operative in France. As his dissolute lifestyle threatens to ruin him, his only hope of survival is to risk his paymasters' money at the baccarat table. Across from him sits James Bond, the finest gambler in the British secret service.

Bond's mission: to outplay Le Chiffre and shatter his Soviet cell. Amidst the opulence of the Royale-les-Eaux casino, the two men face each other in a game with the highest stakes of all. `Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of narrative art...the reader has to go on reading' John Betjeman