Carte Blanche (novel)

Carte Blanche

First edition cover
Author	Jeffery Deaver
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	James Bond
Genre	Spy novel
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date	26 May 2011
Media type	Print (Hardcover)

Carte Blanche is a James Bond novel written by Jeffery Deaver. Commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications, it was published in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton on 26 May 2011 and was released in the United States by Simon & Schuster on 14 June 2011.Carte Blanche is the thirty-seventh original James Bond novel and the first to have a contemporary setting since The Man with the Red Tattoo by Raymond Benson was published in 2002. The title and cover artwork were unveiled on 17 January 2011, at a special launch event at the InterContinental Hotel in Dubai.

Carte Blanche updates James Bond's backstory to fit with the 21st century setting. Jeffery Deaver has stated that his James Bond will have been born in 1979, making him a veteran of the war in Afghanistan (Operation Herrick) instead of a Second World War veteran and Cold War secret agent as originally conceived by creator Ian Fleming.

Set in mid-2011, the story takes place over the course of a week. James Bond is a former Royal Naval Reserve officer who has recently joined the Overseas Development Group - a covert operational unit of British security under the control of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office tasked "to identify and eliminate threats to the country by extraordinary means." Bond is employed within the 00 Section of the Operations Branch.

He starts his assignment on the outskirts of Novi Sad in Serbia where an Irish sapper-turned-enforcer named Niall Dunne is planning to derail a train carrying three hundred kilograms of methyl isocyanate, dumping it into the Danube. Bond is able to prevent the catastrophe by derailing the train himself at a much safer place along the line. He is unable to detain Dunne, who kills Bond's Serbian contacts in the course of his escape.