David Highfill says: “Kim Sherwood has pulled off the seemingly impossible task of writing a new Bond novel that’s both respectful of Fleming’s original genius and yet refreshingly modern. It is firmly set in the modern era, which is quite jarring, in that it uses characters from the Fleming books, but in slightly different roles, with slightly different back stories, so one wonders the point of using them at all ,instead of new characters. With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my digital ARC to read in exchange for an honest review.

Sherwood's debut novel Testament, published in 2018, won the Bath Novel Award, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award, shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel, and won the Harpers’ Bazaar Big Book Award. A cleverly plotted and absorbing novel with a fantastic cast of fully rounded characters in this breathtaking new novel. So much so, that I purchased it at the same time as Stephen King's latest (he's my favourite authour), and I decided to read this first. Of course it wouldn’t be Bond without its cast of infamous characters like M, Q and Moneypenny – and the author has a golden eye when it comes to what readers may want and need from this novel. Tech billionaire so Bertram Paradise makes a huge claim, that his company can reverse the climate crisis.Sherwood] rises impressively to all the challenges of the formula — the cliffhangers, the exotic locations, the wry specificity about lifestyle and weaponry brands, the blend of “kiss kiss” and “bang bang” — while adding ideas such as making Q a quantum computer and putting the climate crisis at her remarkable thriller’s centre. It seems a more accurate reflection of the real world and certainly the direction of the spy-craft genre. Some of the action was tortuous and unconvincing and I’m not referring to the actual torture scenes. The start of a brand-new trilogy following MI6’s Double 0 agents with a license to kill, that blows the world of James Bond wide open!

After all, no Bond book – original or spin off – would be complete without an absurdly rich, morally challenged, over-the-top antagonist, with a strange taste in household pets. I don’t care about anyone saying this pails in comparison to Ian Fleming’s books, because it’s not even trying to mimic them. Toch is de link nooit veraf en laat dat ruimte om James Bond op het einde van de reeks terug ten tonele te voeren. This book was a bit of a tough read to begin with as it jumped around a lot introducing the new characters and the plot. It is not all new figures - Q, M and Moneypenny are all here too, alongside a global menace, action scenes, chases and even romance too.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The majority of it is clearly contemporary and yet Q is now a (bizarrely large) quantum computer (a bad idea robbing us of character interplay) as is the "brain" of the antagonist. It starts off with a promising premise but descends further and further into a turgid mess as the author has no idea how to bring together the separate threads of the story into anything cohesive. There’s too much book, it’s 415 pages and three different primary characters it’s shoving in your face. The world of Bond is in expert hands’ Tim Glister, author of Red Corona You may also be interested in.