This is book 13 of the "Modesty Blaise" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

 

The last Modesty Blaise book. It's a story collection.

Bellman

Once again, Modesty and Willie pay for not killing an earlier opponent when they had the chance.

They're captured, dumped on an island with rigged tools and a bottle of salted water, and three expert hunters come after them. So of course they capture the three hunters alive, and then take over the boat that Bellman, a drug lord who specializes in getting kids hooked, is watching from.

A nice twist that his not-adopted daughter actually doesn't know he's a drug lord, and thinks Modesty and Willie are bad people. At least at first.

The Dark Angels

The special top-line assassin team gets a contract on somebody Tarrant has Modesty and Willie protecting, and ceases to exist.

It was a setup from the beginning -- the Texan tycoon is actually an ex-CIA man playing a role, and the newspaper stories were plants, to attract the hit. The people who created the Dark Angels are a group of "small England" businessmen who want to stop foreign takeovers of important British companies by any means necessary.

Old Alex

Modesty is imprisoned in a cave to starve to death by people with a grudge. The man who gets her out is a missing heir to an English title, who lost his memory in WWII and has been living on a farm in France all this time.

Steven and Dinah get assaulted by a thug in a pub, and it turns out he has Salamander 4 connections.

In the end Salamander 4 ceases to exist, and Old Alex goes back to live on the farm.

The Girl with the Black Balloon

A crazy Swedish diplomat is being held hostage, and will be returned in pieces if he isn't rescued soon (his country and Britain both refuse to pay the ransom on principle). The agent Tarrant had put in was returned in pieces.

Willie and Modesty manage to get on the track of these people through the help of an Australian aborigine they know, who smells them out at a charity function. Then there's a landing on the roof by hot air balloon, and a fight through the halls, after hiding the crazy diplomat in his own room, where nobody will look carefully for him.

Cobra Trap

Didn't reread this one. But I've read it before, and since we're doing spoilers I'll mention that Modesty and Willie get killed off. They're rescuing Steve and Dinah from some South American nonsense again. Tarrant died off-stage between stories, shortly after his retirement. And Modesty has terminal cancer anyway.