To write a new James Bond novel: dream job or poisoned chalice? The prospect of those millions of fans looking over your shoulder, nit-picking at every potential failure of tone or detail, must daunt even the most ardent admirer of Ian Fleming's urbane hero. Sebastian Faulks, the last contemporary writer to receive the imprimatur of the Fleming estate for an adult Bond novel, took a lot of flak on fan sites for his 2008 addition to the canon, Devil May Care. There was a suspicion that the highly regarded literary novelist viewed this excursion into genre as slumming it, and that the resulting book was little more than an exercise in pastiche.

The Fleming estate has perhaps decided to avoid any such criticism this time around by commissioning veteran thriller writer Jeffery Deaver, who unwittingly revealed his credentials when he spoke warmly of his admiration for Bond's creator after winning the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award in 2004. After 28 suspense novels, there is no doubt that Deaver knows his way around a thriller plot, and Bond fans should be satisfied with the rollicking pace of 007's new adventure, which barely gives our hero time to sit down for a martini or glance at his Rolex Oyster Perpetual before the plot twists and lurches off on another page-turning race against the clock.

Unlike Faulks's novel, which was set in 1967 as a direct continuation of Fleming's original series, Deaver has chosen to transport the character firmly into the present. There's an initial jarring when you read, a few pages in, that Bond is "in his thirties", but suspension of disbelief is a requirement for any Bond novel, regardless of decade. So it's just taken for granted that Bond has, like the Doctor, somehow regenerated. Deaver's challenge is to achieve a balance between redrawing Bond as a plausible 21st-century hero and retaining the familiar characteristics that make him uniquely Bond  something which the films have long grappled with.

The most obvious innovation is that Bond now belongs to a new and highly secret division of British intelligence known as the Overseas Development Group, an outfit modelled on the Special Operations Executive in the second world war, but tailored to counter post-9/11 threats. Its agents are charged with defending the realm "by any means necessary"  carte blanche, in other words, to step outside the law when the situation demands. M, Moneypenny and Mary Goodnight are all present and recognisable (none of this reinventing M as a woman), though Q has become a cricket-loving techno wizard of Indian heritage named Sanu Hirani, and Bond's most trusted gadget is an advanced version of the iPhone (nicknamed, naturally, the iQphone) with all manner of apps for surveillance.

After a hair-raising opening sequence in Serbia featuring car chase, shoot-out and the near-derailment of a train carrying lethal chemicals, Bond's main mission is to prevent a massive terrorist atrocity. The only clue is an intercept promising thousands of deaths on the night of Friday 20th, with British interests adversely affected. Bond has only five days to determine the nature of the threat, identify its main players and stop them, while dodging unknown assailants who want him dead and the usual buffoonery of chinless incompetents within the British security services, sticklers for procedure who oblige him to interpret carte blanche in his own way.

Bond finds himself pitted against the murky Severan Hydt, magnate of a global empire of refuse collection and recycling  a nicely topical metaphor. Hydt is a particularly Deaveresque villain, a man whose macabre fascination with death and decay verges on pornographic. With the help of his old friends Felix Leiter and René Mathis, Bond follows Hydt's trail from the Balkans to Dubai to South Africa.

Deaver is a master of the twist in the tale and he deploys it here with cinematic verve, keeping the reader biting their nails until the last minute (perhaps unsurprisingly, the novel feels coloured by a consciousness of Bond's screen legacy  one character is even described as resembling Kate Winslet, for the benefit of future casting directors). But the author's affection for Bond and for all the tropes that surround him is abundantly clear, so that Carte Blanche reads like a lovingly crafted homage rather than deliberate pastiche. Deaver's Bond is quite recognisably Bond, but a new, streamlined incarnation for a new generation of global fears.

What kind of sunglasses would James Bond wear today? Such is one of the important branding questions addressed by this literary reboot, which is "© Ian Fleming Publications Limited", though composed by a writer of serial-killer thrillers. Bond in 2011 still drives a Bentley, wears a Rolex, and waves a Walther, but his shades are hip and technical: he sports Oakleys.

This new Bond is "a man of serious face", which probably does not mean that he has a really massive face and needs oversized Oakleys. Bond is in his 30s, a former navy officer who saw frontline action in Afghanistan and was then recruited  not to MI6, but to a black-ops outfit called the "Overseas Development Group". Bond is still run by M and furnished with gadgets by "Q Branch". (Bond's mobile phone, in an excitingly modern way, has lots of espionage "apps".)

The plot sees Bond running around Serbia, London and Cape Town, trying to prevent an explosion going off somewhere and killing people. He investigates a rum villain called Severan Hydt, who has long, "yellowing" fingernails and an obsession with corpses and decay. Hydt runs an international waste-disposal company: in his crazy headquarters complex, he delivers an interminable speech to Bond about, appropriately enough, rubbish. Even the "deafening" noise of his machines doesn't diminish his lust for exposition: "'Recycling's a curious business,' Hydt yelled."

Hydt's main enforcer is a taciturn Irishman named Niall Dunne, who at one point "stood still as a Japanese fighting fish". (You know, one of those fish that stand very still, on their little fishy legs?) Other henchmen are made the more threatening by the scary versatility of their eye muscles: "The assailant glanced up and, scowling, stared at the intruder."

Bond is a more sensitive fellow than he used to be, even when he is being pursued by enemies: "Bond saw no reason to kill the young man so he shot him near the elbow." Fleming's hero in Casino Royale considers women fit to be "softly wooed or brutally ravaged", but nu-Bond declines to go to bed with a hot colleague (owner of an "insulated leather jumpsuit"), because she's on the rebound. Understandably, he is less able to resist the cratylically named food-aid entrepreneur Felicity Willing. "Her face was intense, striking. Expertly made up, it exuded a feline quality." She had, I am guessing, drawn cat's whiskers on her cheeks with eyeliner.

Our modern-day Bond is healthier, too: a "former smoker" (no more Balkan Sobranies, alas) who still likes the odd cocktail but also spends "at least an hour a day exercising and running". This helps him in the novel's action scenes  a train derailment, a building being demolished, a gun battle in an exotic garden  where he sprints about a lot and does things, in a fascinatingly inert action-movie shorthand: "Bond ran to the warehouse and used a lock pick to open a side door." In one scene, an ally is tied to a conveyor belt trundling towards the gnashing jaws of a garbage compactor, very much as Adam West's Batman always was. The total lack of suspense is palpable, despite the staccato paragraphing. Still, the last 80 or so pages of Carte Blanche do sputter into a kind of mindlessly diverting life. For example, Bond does something satisfyingly clever with a door.

Fleming's Bond was not much of a comedian, and Deaver's isn't either. The difference is that he tries to be. "Upscale pubs were more 'ghastly' than 'gastro', he'd once quipped." Perhaps it's the nicotine withdrawal. Bond does have a usefully named secretary to whom he can say "Good morning, Goodnight", but the best comic effects derive from the style's fanatical commitment to elegant variation. When Bond thoughtfully studies a bullet, subsequent reference to the bullet cannot call it a bullet again; it must be "the solid piece of ammunition". If Bond "whisks" a woman's dress off, subsequent reference to the dress cannot call it a dress again; it must be "the insubstantial blue cloth". And if Bond scrambles some eggs, subsequent reference to the eggs cannot call them eggs again; they must be "steaming curds". That image is a poetic, almost alchemical transformation, and in a way Deaver has accomplished the same feat with his novel as a whole: taking the nutritious egg of the Bond mythos and turning it into one giant steaming curd.