The Bottom Line: A hilarious “one last mission” spy caper featuring the one man MI6 never hired but somehow still needs.
James Flynn is once again convinced he is exactly the man the free world needs. In Haris Orkin’s From Lompoc with Love, the sixth book in the James Flynn Escapade series, the delusional hero is living in Switzerland with Caitlyn Valentine, trying to enjoy something like retirement after their last brush with death. As series fans know, Flynn is a former psychiatric patient who believes he is an international superspy. Flynn’s supposed retirement is already fraying when he and Caitlyn visit the Schilthorn, where a spy-themed tourist attraction rattles loose old memories and delusions. Before long, his panic sends them hurtling down a snowy mountainside in a stolen cello case.
The intrigue begins as a Russian sleeper agent in Lompoc, California, contacts MI6 with an extraordinary offer: she will defect and expose a network of embedded Russian agents, but only to the man she believes is an MI6 operative. That man is Flynn, whose public exploits have made his fantasy life look, from the outside, almost plausible. MI6 knows he is not one of theirs, but it also knows the potential intelligence windfall is too large to ignore, so the agency sends an anxious handler to Switzerland to bring its most inconvenient asset back into the game.
That mix of absurdity and actual peril has been the series’ calling card since Goldhammer, where Flynn’s complete delusion turned City of Roses Psychiatric Institute into his imagined intelligence headquarters. License to Die pushed him into the more menacing surroundings of Hornitos State Mental Hospital, while The Spy Who Hated Me expanded the canvas to London, the Orient-Express, Monte Carlo, and Ivanov’s world-threatening schemes. From Lompoc with Love continues that outward expansion, but it also changes the emotional balance. Sancho remains a warmly comic link to Flynn’s past and Caitlyn carries more of the romantic and moral weight. Duncan is a welcome comic addition, a nervous professional sent to handle a man no one can really handle.
As in the earlier Flynn books, the comedy works because the threats are real even when Flynn’s interpretation of them is not. Orkin gets strong mileage from the gap between Flynn’s self-image and the facts around him, but he also understands why the fantasy matters. Flynn’s delusion is absurd, yet it is also the source of his courage. The Schilthorn sequence captures the book’s particular balance – broad physical comedy, action-movie momentum and a sharp undertow of sadness as Caitlyn watches the man she loves mistake emotional distress for operational necessity.
The book is unusually well-traveled for a comic thriller, and Orkin uses each location as more than backdrop. Switzerland gives the opening its deceptive calm: Interlaken suggests recovery and romance, while the Schilthorn and Piz Gloria turn alpine tourism into a collision between Flynn’s delusions and spy-movie mythology. California then shifts the novel into sunlit counterintelligence, from Los Angeles and the City of Roses Psychiatric Institute to Solvang’s Danish storefronts, Lompoc’s defense-industry shadow, Malibu glamour, Cambria’s coastal refuge, and Bob’s Berry Farm’s theme-park absurdity. Russia supplies the hard contrast, especially the frozen prison world of Kharp and Polar Owl, where the comedy darkens into brutality and state power. The route also takes in London, with MI6 bureaucracy, luxury hotels, clubs, and old-world spy theater, along with stopovers and transit points such as Kazakhstan, Omsk, Salekhard, Helsinki, and, later, Bali. The result is a globe-trotting structure that lets the novel move from resort farce to prison-break danger to intelligence-world intrigue without losing Flynn’s peculiar comic charge.For returning fans, From Lompoc with Love delivers the pleasures the series has trained them to expect – absurdity, sudden bursts of violence, and the uneasy mix of slapstick comedy and genuine emotional damage.
