King Zero: Featuring Ian Fleming's James Bond
Charlie Higson already knows Bond as well as anyone alive, having written five of the nine Young Bond novels chronicling 007 as a schoolboy, but King Zero marks his first full-length adult Bond novel, arriving after a well-received 2023 novella he wrote for King Charles's coronation. Working in official collaboration with the Ian Fleming Estate, Higson continues a lineage of authors tapped to carry Bond forward since Fleming's death, including Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, and most recently Anthony Horowitz. George Lazenby, who played Bond himself in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, called the novel "a cracking read." The story opens with a murdered agent in the Saudi desert, killed by a weapon the Secret Service has never seen before, and traces Bond's investigation across the globe toward a villain the publisher calls the most distinctive since Goldfinger. The US hardcover edition runs 400 pages.

