Goldfinger

Goldfinger is the most widely influential novel in the James Bond series by British author Ian Fleming. The story begins with the loss of British and American gold and the black-market trade surrounding it: during a check at a Jamaican airport, Bond intercepts a mysterious courier, which turns his attention toward one of Britain's wealthiest men, Auric Goldfinger. A seemingly generous businessman who operates under the cover of gold mines, chemicals, and export trade, Goldfinger secretly runs a gold-smuggling network of staggering scale and repeatedly matches wits with Bond over golf matches, card games, and other occasions. As the investigation deepens, Bond discovers that Goldfinger's ambitions go far beyond smuggling profits: hired by a hostile power, he plans to break into the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, blow open the vault, and detonate a nuclear device to contaminate the American gold reserve with radiation, thereby sharply raising the value of the gold he has stockpiled. If this scheme, known as Operation Grand Slam, succeeds, it will shake the entire Western financial system. Working with the female pilot Pussy Galore and his CIA counterpart Felix Leiter, Bond gets the warning out at the edge of death and ultimately foils Goldfinger's plan. The novel combines precise technical detail, coldly rendered violence, and a villain of distinctive personal magnetism; it is a classic of the Cold War espionage genre and was adapted into a film of the same name starring Sean Connery.