His name is Flynn. James Flynn. He is handsome and always well-dressed. He speaks four languages. He is devastatingly attractive to women, physically fit, and a master of martial arts.

He is also a patient in a mental hospital. He believes the hospital to be the headquarters of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and calls the director “N,” believing him to be his official superior. When management changes and N disappears, along with a patient Flynn calls “Q,” he escapes in order to rescue them. Along the way he picks up an orderly named Sancho as his sidekick, and rescues a fellow patient, an attractive girl named Dulcie, from her abusive boyfriend. But the greater challenge remains – the world, he is convinced, is under threat from an evil criminal mastermind, and Flynn, along with his bemused (often terrified) comrades, must step in to stop disaster.

Oddly enough, he’s kind of right.

So what we’ve got in You Only Live Once is a send-up of James Bond, in fusion with an homage to Don Quixote.

The book was amusing. It wasn’t as funny as I hoped, because the author tells it pretty much straight. The humor comes strictly from the preposterous situations our heroes get into.

I didn’t love You Only Live Once, but it was entertaining. I suspect a lot of readers will like it very much.