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Killing Eve: No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings - review

Jodie Comer plays Villanelle in Killing Eve: Sid Gentle Films/Robert Viglasky
Jodie Comer plays Villanelle in Killing Eve: Sid Gentle Films/Robert Viglasky

Forget the overrated TV series, Luke Jennings’s tales of Sapphic slapstick work better on the page and this sequel to Codename Villanelle ignores the events of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s adaptation. Like his remarkable crackpot assassin, Jennings goes his own sweet way.

Once again the reader is treated to a banquet of minced spies. The echoes of Ian Fleming and John le Carré are deafening and the ensuing double-crossing and switch-hitting out-spoofs them both.

The kiss-kiss-bang-bangs take place amid a blizzard of brand names, in London, Moscow and Venice: “The darkening canal, the illuminated waterside buildings... the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. Almost too much beauty to bear,” thinks Villanelle, “and all of it dying. As are we all… There’s no tomorrow, there’s only today.”

Eve Polastri, the hapless British agent on her tail, begins to learn more about The Twelve, Villanelle’s faceless employers. V, meanwhile, goes undercover as a maid to eliminate a gay fascist in a mountaintop eyrie. It’s all very amusing and wholly unedifying.

It says much for our times that Jennings, author of such fine novels as Atlantic (1995), must now churn out this camp nonsense — the zenith/nadir of which features a huge exploding dildo. Think hole-burst not Hollinghurst.

Killing Eve: No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings (John Murray, £14.99)