Published By: Zaffre
Pages: 384
Released On: 23/10/2025
Q is out of MI6 . . . and in over his head
After Q (aka Major Boothroyd) is unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence developing technologies for MI6’s 00 agents, he finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water.
His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note. The police seem uninterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier’s ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces . . .
Can Q decode the truth behind Napier’s death, even as danger closes in?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Zaffre for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This probably has to have been my most anticipated book of the year. I met Vaseem at the Harrogate Crime Festival and he seemed like such a nice man.
My late father was an enormous James Bond fan, and even though he died eight years ago, I still keep hold of his Bond DVD collection, so yeah, this had a lot to live up to. And if I’m honest, it didn’t.
I struggled with it. It felt a bit…I don’t know how t explain it, like the characters were trying to be all mysterious and in doing so, every sentence felt like an internal commentary, like every sentence was trying to be mysterious and it felt a bit flimsy, I suppose is the way I can describe it. Like everything was trying to hard and I was struggling to actually figure out the meaning of the sentence. I don’t know fi that made sense but it’s the only way I can describe it.
It’s quite repetitive. I don’t mind repetition on the whole, but it was too much in this and grated on me.
It’s in the third person and had a number of narrators and POVs, which I usually like but I found it quite confusing flitting from one to the next and I was struggling to keep up.
I found myself tuning out a bit, like I kept looking at the page number to see how long I had left, and I was wondering if I could skip bits. I usually give a book 25% through before I DNF and I could have given up at several points here but I did push through.
I can appreciate Vaseem’s ability in world creating, that was impressive.
Maybe the spy genre is one that I appreciate more on the screen than on the page, who knows. I don’t usually feel bad about writing negative reviews because it’s just my opinion, but because I like Vaseem as a person (of what I know him) and this has been praised so much, but I have to be honest. Looking at other reviews, it does feel like a 5 star or 2 star read, so I feel I’m not alone.
But it does post the question as to whether we needed a dedicated Q book or not. I’m not sure Q is a reliable and strong enough narrator to have his own book.
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