Isobel Merritt reviews Play On, Christina Nott, by Ed Adams

★★★★★ (but uneasy about it)

I finished Play On, Christina Nott with the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve already met Christina.

Not in Saint Petersburg. Not as a pop star or an intelligence asset. But across a table. In an airport lounge. In a meeting where nobody said who was really in charge, but everyone behaved as if they knew.

Christina isn’t written as a fantasy. That’s the disturbing part. She’s not glamorous in the usual way. She doesn’t announce herself. She listens, calibrates, waits. I recognise the posture — the stillness that isn’t passive, the way a room seems to adjust around her rather than the other way round. I’ve worked with people like this. Or near them. Or underneath them, without realising it at the time.

What Adams gets frighteningly right is how power feels now. Not loud. Not ideological. Comfortable. Polite. Procedural. The novel doesn’t explain this so much as enact it. You read a scene and only later realise you’ve been nudged into agreement, into acceptance, into thinking something was inevitable when it wasn’t.

Christina never boasts. She never needs to. By the end, you understand that competence like hers isn’t about control — it’s about timing. About knowing when a system has already decided and stepping neatly into the gap it leaves.

I don’t know if Christina Nott is a composite, or a warning, or just a mirror.

What I do know is that after reading this book, I’ve started paying closer attention to certain silences in conversations. And to people who never seem to sweat — except maybe, once, very briefly, at the back of the neck.

That’s not a coincidence.