“Hello Q” said Commander James Bond. Enjoying retirement yet?”
Q’ute, quosy qurime meets elements of Ian Fleming in Vaseem Khan’s QUANTUM OF MENACE.
Pay attention 007 lovers.
Major Boothroyd, the quintessential quartermaster has been cashiered from His Majesty’s Secret Service. Certainly miffed at his premature redundancy, his pensioning off takes a back seat when the apparent murder of a childhood friend, scientist entrepreneur, Peter Napier, sends him back to his childhood hometown of Wickstone-on-Water to investigate.
Here all sorts of teeming intrigue come crawling out of the past’s collision with the present, especially with the strained reconciliation with his estranged father. Is it because of the name he gave his son? And will that name be revealed before the final chapter? Or is there a murkier reason pertaining to the death of Q’s mother?
Extraordinary revelations are unearthed regarding Miss Moneypenny, M and James Bond. Remember, conjecture rhymes with SPECTRE.
In this cyberspace tinged mystery, we meet Miss Honeypenny, a humanoid torso set on a wheeled base with an artificial brain powered by a neural processing unit, the latest in computer chip technology.
We learn that Q has history with local detective Kathy Burnham, that he has inherited a dog named bastard, a piebald bulldog, and that he drives a Caterham.
There’s a scare the living daylights secret project called BETSY, and a Deliveroo rider from hell. Q’s quizzing gets the plot fizzing putting zest into the quest.
Can Q crack the code? Can Q as quarry equalise his quandary. Little quarrel and far less quibble, QUANTUM OF MENACE succeeds.
Join the queue for this view to a quill. In the absence of a Bond continuation novel, QUANTUM of MENACE more than suffices. An invention of whom Ian Fleming would be proud.
QUANTUM OF MENACE by Vaseem Khan is published by Zaffre.
