Summary:
Final Fling picks up with Moneypenny intensifying her search to uncover "The Sieve," a possible mole in MI6. Meanwhile, Col. Hunter is brought in as the new Deputy Chief with Percy Warren as the new Deputy Cabinet Office Secretary. As M becomes more obsessed with his own hunt for the Sieve and Bill Tanner acting increasingly distant, Moneypenny is sent to Jamaica, where she will be out of the way. She reunites with Mary Goodnight and stays for her wedding, but when she learns that 009, who had been missing, turns up just in time to die of an unknown illness, she defies orders and returns to London with Bond.
Bond is sent on a mission to get a hold of the samples of the virus that Dr. Marches is planning to sell. When he returns, with MI6 on shaky grounds and Hunter seeming to make a bit of a power-play, Bond is terminated from the Service.
Moneypenny is stopped short in her efforts to find the mole, but things heat up when Hilary Quatermayne, the new Double O secretary, tells Moneypenny that she had been seeing a man named Nikolai (Niko), whom she now fears might be the Sieve. Moneypenny tells her not to worry, but is wary herself when she "bumps into" Niko at the park. He tells her that he is worried the KGB is trying to kill him because of what he knows of the mole in MI6. He doesn't know who it is, but he gives Moneypenny his code name, "Colin." It just so happens that this was the name of Bill Tanner's younger brother.
Moneypenny, with apparently no friends left in the Service, tries to resign, but M "demotes" her instead. She is told to stay low, and told to rendezvous with M and Bond. They inform her that Bond's removal from MI6 had been engineered to help flush out the mole. Moneypenny is to discreetly leak word that Bond is furious at having been kicked out, and that he kept a sample of Dr. Marches' virus to sell to the highest bidder, in the hopes that the mole will be interested.
Meanwhile, in present day, Kate Westbrook is trying to finish her aunt's uncovering of the Sieve, as well as discover the true nature of her drowning death. She goes to Uist in Scotland, Moneypenny's home for the last years of her life. After she leaves, she fears she is being followed. She meets MacIntyre, who works in "some capacity" for the Service, and warns her off. He even goes so far as to arrange a teaching position for her at Harvard to trick her out of the country. Kate doesn't take the bait, and instead hunts down Hunter. When she meets him, she is convinced he was not the Sieve, and he adds no useful information. Almost out of leads, Kate goes to see Dorothy Fields, a senior officer in the Service at the time of the Sieve, and officially the one in charge of discovering him or her. Dorothy reveals to Kate that M kept an extensive "mole file" that he may have given to Moneypenny near the time of his death, and also that "Colin" was in Uist at the time of Moneypenny's drowning.
Kate finds the mole file, as well as her aunt's true last diary. (Kate had thought she had them all.) With this information, she discovers that Percy Warren had been the Sieve, and that whether by her own hand or his, both Moneypenny and he had died in the drowning accident.
My Grade: A Easily the best of the three Moneypenny Diaries, this one ratchets up the action and suspense, having more Bond-like moments of danger while keeping to the "mystery" feel of the first two. This book also shows us plenty of old faces from Fleming's books, and fills in the ends to their stories quite satisfactorily.
Best Moment: While I'm not usually one for shock endings, this one felt right, keeping the mystery going even after the book ends. Kate goes to see Bill Tanner to tell him how things wrapped up, and she asks what ever happened to Bond. Tanner tells her she should know, as she has already met him. Like most people, I assumed Bond would show up in the present day somewhere in the course of kate's searchings. However, it is in the hands of the reader to figure out who he was. There are plenty of hints, and I have my theory, which I'm sure mathces the large majority of those who have read this book. (If you read this page very carefully, you'll see I've left a clue myself as to who it might be.) But, ultimately, this is one last mystery that may never be fully solved.
