For 15 years Anthony Horowitz diligently served his apprenticeship through his adventures of Alex Rider, a precocious 14-year-old English public school boy cum junior spy. And then, last year, the Fleming family commissioned Horowitz to carry on their Uncle Ian's franchise – that of James Bond, the man Alex was one day meant to be.

Trigger Mortis is the 25th post-Fleming Bond, and Horowitz is the seventh author to be handed the mantle. He brings some form to the job – as an accomplished scriptwriter of Midsomer​ Murders and Foyle's War, and as a prince of pastiche with two creditable, authorised Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. As Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd have found before him, Horowitz had the all-but-impossible challenge of meeting the expectations of Bond addicts and following Fleming's method: "Each chapter is like a wave to be jumped as we race behind the hero like a water-skier behind a fast motor boat."

Bond's love of anything fast makes the high-octane, testosterone-fuelled world of Formula One a natural setting for Trigger Mortis. In his first novel, Casino Royale (1953), Fleming wrote of Bond's car, "one of the last of the 4½-litre Bentleys … Bond drove it hard and well and with an almost sensual pleasure".

And so along with his beloved Bentley Mark VI, we encounter a Cooper Climax T43, a Maserati 250F and an Aston Martin 8CTF. And while on hot machines and sensual pleasure, Horowitz brings back into Bond's bed Pussy Galore – the leader of the Cement Mixers, the lesbian gang from the seventh Bond novel, Goldfinger (1959). It was the violet-eyed Pussy who famously/fatuously explained her conversion: "I never met a man before."

The action in Trigger takes place only a fortnight after the death of Auric Goldfinger in Fleming's novel, and Bond has taken Pussy back with him to his London flat, "just off the King's Road". But even if Pussy could boil his three-and-a-half-minute egg just the way he liked it, two weeks was, for Bond, a very long time.

As the novelist Rosamond Lehmann observed about Fleming, "The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them" – and so with Bond. Apart from M's secretary, Moneypenny, and his own, Loelia Ponsonby (whom we see glimpses of here), few Bond Girls can sustain our hero's interest into a second novel. But two more tough, accomplished, and quite modern beauties – Logan Fairfax and Jeopardy Lane – are introduced, and take their places in the Bond firmament.

For every Bond beauty there must be a villain and, as it's 1957, we have one from Russia with loathing, Ivan Dimitrov, whose face is "exactly the same colour as the smoke he was inhaling" with his mouth "a narrow slash, a wound made with a blunt knife". The other classic Fleming villain is Korean – Jason Sin, "doll-like", with "slightly effeminate features", thick spectacles, "childlike teeth as white as pearls" – who is mysteriously rich. Like all Bond villains, he has a back story, and we learn more about him than we ever do about our hero.

But it is Bond's sketchiness, his unknowability that allows him to endure and remain the subject of constant reinvention. He's not quite a cypher, but he needs a good plot to make him fit to read. Here, Horowitz has nailed it. He is true to Fleming's formula: "My plots are fantastic, while often being based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond the possible."

Does it spoil the plot to say Bond gets to live another day? But he must – his fans, and the franchise, demand it.