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Published in 2017 as a compilation of four serial e-book novellas originally released between 2014 and 2016, Codename Villanelle arrived with modest ambitions and an unusual shape. It became, almost by accident, the seedbed for one of the most distinctive television thrillers of its era. Reading it now, with Killing Eve's afterglow still warming the material, is a strange and interesting experience. The book is lean, propulsive, and frequently sleek, but it is also less than the sum of what it inspired.

The premise remains magnetic. Oxana Vorontsova, a brilliant linguistics student with a violent past, is plucked from a Russian remand centre and remade as Villanelle, an elegant assassin in the employ of a shadowy cabal known as the Twelve. Her counterpart, Eve Polastri, is a British intelligence officer of quiet competence, the sort of person whose unremarkable surface hides a sharp and curious mind. The two circle each other across Europe and beyond, through Paris, Sicily, Shanghai and Odessa, each leaving traces the other can read.

Jennings writes at remarkable speed. The prose is clean and economical, and the set pieces are stylish, full of weaponry lovingly specified and luxury lovingly catalogued. The assassination sequences are the book's strongest asset. They glitter. There is a Fleming-ish quality to the mixture of tailored clothes, expensive hotels, and cold professional violence, and the Bond comparison that several reviewers reach for feels earned. Villanelle herself, at her best, is genuinely unsettling, a psychopath whose pleasures are aesthetic and whose empathy is a closed door. Her backstory, sketched efficiently across the opening chapters, gives just enough ground to stand on without lapsing into sentimentality.

Where the book falters is in the spaces between the kills. The episodic origins are visible, and not always flatteringly so. Each novella reads almost as a self-contained mission, and the stitching shows. The result is a narrative that feels repetitious in structure, moving from target to target without accumulating much emotional weight. The ending arrives more as a pause than a resolution, a clear setup for the sequel rather than a proper denouement. For readers who have come expecting a tightly plotted standalone thriller, the cliffhanger may feel unearned.

The characters outside the two leads are notably thin. Konstantin, Villanelle's handler, is a shape more than a person. Niko, Eve's husband, appears mainly as a domestic counterweight. Even Eve, the more emotionally legible of the two protagonists, is not given enough room to breathe. Her obsession with Villanelle is asserted more often than it is inhabited. The book's imagination lives almost entirely with its assassin, and while that focus produces some excellent passages, it leaves the hunt feeling one-sided.

Then there is the matter of Villanelle's sex life, which receives considerable and not always useful attention. There are moments when the sexual content feels organic to the character, a logical expression of her appetite and control, and moments when it tips into something more gratuitous, closer to male fantasy than to psychological study. The book is better when it trusts Villanelle's coldness to do the work and worse when it seems to be performing her danger for an imagined reader.

The comparison with the television adaptation is impossible to avoid, and it is not kind to the book. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's version of this material found humour, queerness, and strange tenderness in places Jennings keeps relatively sealed off. What the novel offers instead is a more straightforward, more traditionally masculine spy thriller, with its pleasures and limitations intact. Read as the origin of something larger, Codename Villanelle is fascinating. Read on its own terms, it is a brisk, flawed, often entertaining debut for a character whose potential is obvious and not yet fully claimed.

It is, in the end, a book to read quickly and with reasonable expectations. The action delivers. The atmosphere delivers. The emotional architecture is still being built, and the reader may find themselves, as so many have, turning to the next volume to see whether it arrives.