This is a new endeavour for Vaseem Khan, after his two award-winning series set in India, the Malabar House and Baby Ganesh series, and his recent standalone US-based thriller, The Girl in Cell A. I’m always intrigued by extended-universe work that builds on well-known characters and creates new offshoots, as part of my general interest in all things adaptation.
I actually found it a little tricky to distinguish Khan’s Q from the internal image of Whishaw, particularly as more recent Bond films have shown us something of his personal life outside of the lab. Here, however, he is entirely outside of MI6, unemployed and returning to his childhood home because after the recent death of a former friend, Napier, Q has received an odd letter from him that suggests the apparent suicide was no such thing.
There is something of a struggle to situate Q in the civilian world because, of course, isn’t it weird for lots of people from his childhood to call him Q…? It is, and at some points he’s addressed as Major Boothroyd, but largely he remains Q, with others deigning to call him such, either to distant the man in front of them from the younger version they really knew, or because Khan ducks any direct address in his dialogue. There is plenty of sense in him thinking of himself still as Q, and part of the narrative tension here is about whether he can successfully forge a new identity and role for himself outside of military intelligence. Still, while this works in a first novel, I wonder how this will age as the series develops.
The plot draws us to the very cutting edge of the twenty-first century and a quantum computing start-up in a pleasant corner of England with some high-profile, highly demanding investors. Ultimately, there is something of a morality tale here about tech hype, which is an interesting play with a main character whose primary character trait is the creation of ingenious (and often entirely implausible) technology. It’s one that works, and it is a nice deviation from the many, many headlines about the perils of AI. Khan has avoided the risk of trying to turn Q into a pseudo-Bond action figure, and although there is menace and danger aplenty, Q is the sort of man who turns to UCL academics to pursue his investigations, and it was nice to see a bit of Khan’s own professional knowledge creeping in here. (Like me, he works at UCL, and in the relevant department!)
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See also
These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
If you’re interested in picking up a copy of any of these, please consider buying it from bookshop.org via the affiliate links here, supporting both independent bookshops and me as an independent author!
- Post After Post-Mortem (ECR Lorac)
- Dead Man’s Shoes (Marion Todd)
- Person of Interest (TV series)
- Instinct (TV series)
- Of course, all things James Bond, in particular the most recent films featuring Ben Whishaw in the Q role. Spectre might be especially on-point here.
- Devs (TV series)
Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.
Dominique Gracia 
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