Moonraker

Moonraker is the third novel by the British author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. It was published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April 1955, with a cover design conceived by Fleming himself.

The plot grew out of a screenplay Fleming had written that was too short to make a full novel, and he added the passage of the bridge game between Bond and the industrialist Hugo Drax to give it length and a second thread. In the first half of the book Drax is a national hero, a man who appeared from nowhere and built Britain a weapon of its own, and Bond is asked to look into his behaviour at the card table. In the second half Bond is seconded to Drax's staff while the businessman completes the Moonraker, a prototype missile designed to defend England. What Bond does not know is that Drax is German, an ex-Nazi now working for the Soviets, and that his plan is to arm the rocket with a nuclear warhead and fire it at London.

Moonraker is the only Bond novel set entirely in Britain, which drew complaints from some readers at the time about the absence of the foreign locations they had come to expect from the series.