Review of Ed Adams - Play On Christina Nott, by KMT

I came to this expecting to skim the opening and get on with the plot. That’s usually my rule with anything that smells like a preface.

Instead, I found myself reading slowly.

What Lab Tours does — and this is something most modern spy novels fail at — is establish the texture of power before introducing its agents. This isn’t exposition. It’s conditioning. By the time we reach Saint Petersburg, the reader has already been trained to notice rooms, rhythms, incentives, and who controls the pace of a conversation.

That’s classic tradecraft thinking, even when no one is calling it that.

The best spy fiction isn’t about secrets; it’s about systems — how people are nudged, softened, isolated, rewarded. This opening understands that instinctively. The idea of “tilt” is exactly right. Intelligence work rarely flips people; it inclines them. A delayed objection here. A compromised assumption there. You don’t need coercion if you control timing.

The Saint Petersburg transition is especially strong. The line about corridors versus rooms is the sort of sentence you’d underline in a le Carré novel — not because it’s pretty, but because it’s operational. It tells you how this city works and, by extension, how the people in it will behave.

When Christina Nott finally appears, she doesn’t arrive as a heroine. She arrives as someone already aligned with the world you’ve just been shown. That’s good discipline. It avoids the rookie mistake of introducing competence as mystique rather than habit.

If I had one note, it’s this: readers used to faster-burning thrillers may initially think the book is “warming up.” It isn’t. It’s establishing pressure. Once you realise that, the pacing makes sense.

Verdict:

This reads like a novel written by someone who understands that espionage isn’t action — it’s environment. If the rest of the book pays off the systems laid down here, this will sit comfortably on the same shelf as Herron and late le Carré, with a more contemporary sense of how power actually moves now.

Not flashy. Not noisy.

But very serious.