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Q is back on a case. The Man with the Golden Compass, the second of Vaseem Khan’s Q Mysteries, is published in the UK in hardback by Zaffre on 22 October 2026, a year after Quantum of Menace opened the series. Ian Fleming Publications describes the books as set in the 007 universe.
The case
Major Boothroyd, dismissed from MI6’s Q Branch and now an amateur detective in his home town of Wickstone-on-Water, is hired by the police as a civilian contractor to look again at an unsolved murder. The victim, a tech millionaire turned online antique dealer, was tortured and killed six months earlier, and a small gold disc inscribed with Nordic runes was found on his body. According to the publisher, the trail leads Q into a conspiracy where past and present meet. Khan has said his favourite new character is Q’s father, Mortimer Boothroyd, a retired historian to whom Q has not spoken for three decades.
Price and ordering
The publisher’s price for the hardback is £20 (ISBN 9781804188699), and Ian Fleming Publications has it open for pre-order now. If you have not read Quantum of Menace, we would start there, since this book follows on from it.
For the rest of this year’s Bond reading, see Charlie Higson’s King Zero and Dan Jones’s novella All In; our novels and fiction section collects the Fleming originals and the continuation books.
Sources: Ian Fleming Publications; Ian Fleming Publications announcement; Bonnier Books.