Review - The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

The Regicide Report (Laundry Files, 14)

Charles Stross
Publisher, 27 January 2026
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Regicide Report to consider for review.

The Regicide Report is the final volume (at least for now?) of Stross's Laundry Files sequence, something that, in my view, has grown into a SFF phenomenon. Over the past two and a half decades I've followed the story of Bob Howard, necromancer, demonologist and computer nerd, through books that began as stories "in the style of" a series of espionage masters, mutated into treatments of classic monsters from horror, and ended up as pretty scathing criticism of UK politics.

Where is the endpoint of all that? In whose name is the espionage carried out out? On whose secret service are Bob, Mo and their colleagues engaged? Who is the most scary monster in the pack? What is at the summit of politics and public administration?

Why, the monarchy itself, of course. So, in a book which I think could probably only have been published following the death of Our Late Queen, here is the apotheosis of the Laundry, its endpoint (literally) as the unspeakable horror which has consumed the British State turns its baleful attention on the Crown itself. And on the billions of person-years of worship and belief that it has accumulated.

Written according  the normal convention of the series (Bob Howard writing his classified work diaries - but we finally see how and why that exercise is being undertaken) The Regicide Files gives us a complex plot hanging on the dilemma of the Laundry and its duty (enforced by geas) to both the current PM (that nameless horror, who was, in truth, the lesser of two evils - as PMs so often are) and to Her Majesty. 

Long-buried External Assets are being awoken, there's trouble afoot at the Palace and Bob's required to wear a fancy suit and shiny shoes. That last may be the thing he worries about most.

This book has all the notes I love in the Laundry Files: the fiendish plot (fiendish in at least two senses of the term), the dry humour, check-ins with most of the vast array of characters Stross has given us to date and a tight, action-filled narrative.  I don't know if this was planned in advance, but it's a story that derives real heft from the recent death of Elizabeth II and indeed probably couldn't have been published before. If you thought that the Royal funeral in 2023 was a big production, well, just look at THESE funeral games... 

I feel this book provides very much the ending that the Laundry (the series, and the institution) deserves. Bob and Mo get plenty of time (I've missed them in the past few books) and development but we're left guessing about just how events will proceed as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN unfolds and what role the Laundry will play in that. (I'm blurring some detail here so as not to spoil, but I will note that - as evidenced by Bob's being at large to write his casenotes, some form of normality does continue, albeit the warped version of the New Management)

Strongly recommended to long-haul Laundry fellow-travellers. If you haven't read these books yet then no, really this isn't the one to begin with but you have some fun in store if you go back and begin with The Atrocity Archives.  

(It was also fun to see Stross adroitly sidestep issues of continuity in the series...)

For more information about The Regicide Report, see the publisher's website here.