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.

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.

★★★★★ Kylie C on Ed Adams - Play On, Christina Nott

Posted by Kylie to substack:

I think I’m in love with Christina Nott.

Not in a useful way. Not in a way she would notice, or permit, or reciprocate. That’s part of the problem — and part of why this book works so well.

Christina isn’t written to be admired. She’s written to be recognised. The intelligence. The restraint. The way she holds herself just slightly apart from the room, as if she’s already accounting for its exit velocity. I know that posture. I’ve felt its gravity. I’ve mistaken it, more than once, for intimacy.

What makes the love unrequited isn’t that Christina is cold. It’s that she’s already elsewhere — in the next move, the next alignment, the next system sliding into place. Even when she’s present, she isn’t available. And Adams is ruthless about that. He never gives you the catharsis of emotional access. He lets you feel the ache instead.

There’s a moment — you’ll know which one — where she almost breaks. Not enough to be comforted. Just enough to remind you she’s human. I wanted to reach for her then. She didn’t need it. She never would.

Reading this felt like sitting across from someone you admire too much to interrupt. You listen. You laugh when it’s appropriate. You don’t ask the question you really want to ask.

The brilliance of Play On, Christina Nott is that it lets you fall for her while quietly teaching you why that was never the point. She doesn’t exist to be loved. She exists to move through systems that don’t love anyone back.

And still — if she asked, I’d follow.

That’s how you know the book has you.

Carney on 'Taking down the sign'

Yep. in full.

Thank you very much, Larry. I'm going to start in French, and then I'll switch back to English.

[The following is translated from French]

Thank you, Larry. It is both a pleasure, and a duty, to be with you tonight in this pivotal moment that Canada and the world going through.

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints. 

On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.

The power of the less power starts with honesty.

[Carney returns to speaking in English]

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won't.

So, what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from itspredictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under itsprotection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination. 

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.

Havel called this “living within a lie”.

The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. 

And this impulse is understandable. A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let's be clear eyed about where this leads.

A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.

Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.

Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.

They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty can also be shared.

Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum. And the question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Now Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.

Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security – that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed “value-based realism”. 

Or, to put another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values. 

So, we're engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values, and we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home.

Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking a trillion dollars of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We're doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. 

And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months. The past few days, we've concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We're negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We're doing something else. To help solve global problems, we're pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So, on Ukraine, we're a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.

Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering, so we're working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Gate, to further secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people. On critical minerals, we're forming buyers’ clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyper-scalers.

This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.

In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.

What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Argue, the middle powers must act together, because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu. 

But I'd also say that great powers, great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. 

But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact.

We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together – which brings me back to Havel. 

What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?

First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion – that's building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government's immediate priority.

And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence, it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent… we also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire. 

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term. 

And we have something else. We have a recognition of what's happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. 

We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.

The powerful have their power.

But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together. 

That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us. Thank you very much.

Play On, Christina Nott - Tokyo, recut

I’m redrafting part of the 2020 Archangel cycle. 

This is an early hinge-point.

Not because anything explodes — but because a different logic quietly takes hold.

From here on, the book pays close attention to who listens, who adapts, and who insists on being heard.

The Tokyo Dome was enormous from the outside.

Inside, it was something else entirely.

“Oh my God,” Lucas said quietly. “Have we ordered enough lights?”

Eckhart nodded. “I asked what the last big act ran. They said BlackPink.”

Clare was already checking. “K-pop. Black rig. Pink lighting.”

Lucas considered it. “If it’s mapped, it’s mapped. Change the colours, keep the structure.”

A technician approached—tall, sharp-featured, long black hair pulled back. He moved like the room belonged to him.

“I’m Rishi,” he said, bowing slightly. “You want to adapt the BlackPink rig?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “Is that a problem?”

Rishi smiled. “Not at all. Everything here already talks to everything else. Once you’re in the Dome system, it’s very fast.”

That sentence alone settled Lucas.

“Can we pull the pink back?”

“You can do whatever you like,” Rishi said. “You’re the support? I’ll put you on a separate lighting universe. Same house rig. Cleaner.”

Erebus arrived mid-conversation.

Rishi excused himself immediately. “I’ll check their requirements.”

As he walked away, Christina noticed two things at once: that he moved with quiet authority—and that he didn’t look back.

---

The stage was already loaded.

High-end touring gear. Proper stacks. Everything pre-wired onto a movable platform.

Lucas exhaled. “This is… generous.”

“I ticked the quality options,” Eckhart said.

“It was the right call.”

Wireless systems snapped online. Foldback came alive.

“Plug into the spiders,” Rishi called from the edge of the stage. A ripple of light moved across the Dome.

“You’re hot,” he said. “Automatic lights. Play something.”

Nate hit the opening notes of Remember Me.

Eight notes.

The sound filled the Dome and came back at them—vast, physical. The lights answered in time.

Alex actually gasped.

“This is insane,” Ellie said, laughing as the keys came in.

Christina stepped to the mic. “Hey DJ?”

They ran it once. Then again. Confidence climbing with every bar.

Rishi watched, arms folded. Not impressed—pleased.

“You suit this room,” he said. “We hear everything here. Not all of it works.”

---

“Come with me,” Rishi said to Clare.

Behind the stage: a warehouse of boxes.

“We over-ordered for BlackPink,” he said. “Merch. Mallets.”

He opened one. Black handle. Pink heart head. It lit when he tapped it.

“They’re unbranded,” he added. “If you sell them tonight, it clears space. And it’ll look good.”

“Split?” Clare asked.

“Seventy–thirty.”

She shook her head.

“Sixty–forty,” he said. “Please.”

“Done.”

They shook.

---

Back on the floor, Erebus were deep in negotiation—control systems, custom hangs, rigging delays.

Christina clocked the difference instantly.

Erebus argued.

Her band adjusted.

Rishi returned with calm explanations. Erebus pushed back. Gantries came down. Time stretched.

“Don’t worry about the support,” Rishi said. “They’re isolated. Different universe.”

“Different planet,” someone muttered as Christina’s band left the stage.

Irina appeared beside them. “Sushi?”

Everyone nodded.

Across the street, Erebus were still re-rigging.