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.

#Review - A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy (Laundry Files, 13)

Charles Stross
Little, Brown, 7 January 2025
Available as: HB, 224pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356524641

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending giving me access to an advance e-copy of A Conventional Boy to consider for review.

A Conventional Boy is a more or less contemporary Laundry Files novella set before the events that brought us The New Management. (If you need to be told what all that means, when we are 13 books into this series, you possibly shouldn't be starting here and I'm not going to explain it all because this is only meant to be a short review - although if you do start her I think you'll soon get the hang of things.)

The protagonist is Derek Reilly, a young boy who, in the 1980s, expressed an incautious love of Dungeons and Dragons and due to an unfortunate misunderstanding was rounded up by the Laundry, the branch of the British secret services that deals with supernatural threats, due to an unfortunate misuderstanding. As a teenager who was very into D&D at the same time, I can only say, there but for the grace of God... 

Well. Decades later, Derek is still banged up, now institutionalised in a shabby camp for - what shall we call them? Not so much political as, perhaps, Ludic prisoners? - situated in the Lake District, England's wettest region. Rehabilitated to a degree, he's allowed to run his play-by-mail RPGs because the camp hierarchy think he's harmless and don't read what he's producing. If they did they might get some hints about their own futures. In an amusingly meta development we see Derek analysing and puzzling over developments in the Laundry saga that readers of the recent books will be well familiar with.

So far, so OK... till one day Derek learns that a major RPG convention is taking place just down the road and he decides to show up. That involves a fiendish escape plan and then contact with the modern world - something he's been denied for thirty years.

All of this is slickly handled and amusingly done, I love the vein of co(s)mic horror that Stross maintains in these books, delivered in the deadpan style of a 1950s field training manual, agents for the use of. At the same time there are I think definite barbs aimed at over commercialised RPG companies (or at one in particular, I'm sure you can guess which) with too much money to splash and no love for the games. One such is up to something nefarious here, and a ragtag group assembles to take them on before something really bad can happen to Derek.

Or before he can do something really bad.

Or perhaps, both.

A Quest (of course!) results, as always in the Laundry books, and while I think Stross has dropped the idea of channeling a particular different author or trope in each of these books, nevertheless, the story follows the logic, as it were, of a dungeon crawling RPG with challenges to be solved and dangers awaiting. That's of course playing to Derek's strengths - he's basically been in training for this all his adult life - and he also has help and support. The final third of the book is therefore a no holds barred battle with the danger not just the immediate threat of the dungeon, but a real peril for the visible world as well.

Great fun and a book I consumed pretty much in one reading. Recommended.

For more information about A Conventional Boy, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Escape from Yokai Land by Charles Stross

Escape From Yokai Land (Laundry Files, 12)
Charles Stross
Tor, 1 March 2022
Available as: HB, 81pp, e
Source: Bought from Transreal Fiction
ISBN: 9781250805706

I loved this novella as I've loved all of Stross's Laundry books. Unlike some of the longer works, it's a fairly simple story: set before the cataclysm of the New Management, it gives us a glimpse of Bob Howard visiting Japan on "business", as teased a couple of times in other stories where this trip conveniently kept him absent from crises which, with his newly-acquired abilities as avatar of the eater of Souls, he might have bossed rather too easily.

So essentially, a supernatural crisis is brewing in Japan and its equivalent of the Laundry has called for help, expecting Angleton (though, as becomes clear, not with any great enthusiasm: he has a reputation...)

Instead they get Bob and, rather than let him loose right away, decide he needs to be tested first. There is therefore a series of interesting scenes between Bob, his liaison Yoko Suzuki, and a series of bizarre supernatural infestations, before we get to the real bad. I enjoyed this, Stross is as ever sharp and economical in summing up the social side of things - the office politics, prejudices and little quirks of corporate life - and in Yoko he creates an interesting protagonist it would be good to meet again (though as the Laundry series is moving to a close, I suspect we won't).

In short, it's nice to get a glimpse of the powered-up Bob, though the book does show why Stross has had to hold him back from the more recent Laundry novels. His new powers don't though protect him from senior management and HR. It was a shame that Mo didn't appear, though I live in hope that we will see her again soon.

You'll obviously want to read this if you are following the Laundry saga, if you aren't it probably won't mean much to you - but then you have the blessing of being able to read the series form the beginning so you should get on and do that.

For more information about Escape From Yokai Land, see the publisher's website here and Mr Stross's online Q&A here.

Review - Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross

Dead Lies Dreaming (A Novel of the Laundry Files)

Charles Stross

Orbit, 29 October 2020

Available as: HB, 384pp, audio, e

Source: advance e-copy via NetGalley

ISBN: 9780356513799

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Dead Lies Dreaming via NetGalley.

After a couple of years' hiatus it's great to see a novel by Charles Stross hitting the streets again - in this case the streets of up-market Kensington in London, home to hedge funds, shady oligarchs' property investments and minor royalty...

...And also to a gang of anarchic robbers with minor superpowers who are staging audacious daylight robberies in order to raise funds for their avant-garde film based on J M Barrie's Peter Pan (in which 'Peter was nothing is not pansexual' - we're not in Disneyland any more).

The book is set is the world of the Laundry Files, Stross's long running series about the occult division of the British Secret Service and its confrontation with nameless, tentacled horrors from beyond the walls of our universe. It's not, though, a "Laundry Files" novel - you won't find Bob Howard here and while the Laundry itself is alluded to a couple of times, it doesn't feature in the events. 

Rather we have the same background, of impending apocalypse, staved off only by the New Management, the ancient horror that has assumed power in Downing Street and which displays the heads of speeding motorists along the M25 - but everything seen much more from an outsider's perspective. The cruelties of the regime are that much starker, when distanced from the high politics that brought them about: 'Imp froze as he rounded the corner onto Regent Street, and saw four elven warriors shackling a Santa to a stainless-steel cross outside Hamleys Toy Shop... When the alfär executioner held his heavy-duty electric screwdriver against Santa's wrist, the screams were audible over the tumble of passing buses.'

Yes, the New Management is all for Law and Order, which makes Imp and his gang's activities distinctly perilous.

Like many of the earlier Laundry novels, this story has a (loose) inspiration in an earlier book, in this case, yes, you won't be surprised it's JM Barrie's novel about Peter and Wendy. (Appropriate, given the associations between Peter and Kensington). So the gang - Imp, Doc, Del, Game Boy - are referred to as the 'Lost Boys' (though strictly one's a girl), we find a dangerous Neverland buried deep behind one of those respectable mansions, there is a Wendy (a character who's perhaps a bit under-used: I hope we'll meet her again) and there are clear thematic links - though as I said above, these aren't to the sanitised, Disneyesque version. The Lost Boys are hunted by the law, hiding out in a den where they enthusiastically share drugs, and once their enemies catch up with them, we're not talking fancy swordplay and taunts - the book features serious weaponry, a massive death toll and some very, very nasty villains.

Oh, and a background of child sacrifice, torture and gangsters.

I did feel that the Boys' separate personas took a little time to become clear. In part I think that's because they're introduce in the middle of a caper, deploying their superpowers right and left in fast moving action. In part it's because there are layers to them and aspects of their identities that aren't, even shouldn't be, obvious - just bear with things a bit here, OK?

Chief among the Boys' opponents are billionaire businessman Rupert Bigge (head of the Big Organisation) and his henchwoman Evelyn Starkey - an ultraefficient PA/ assassin ('work was a game she played in boss mode') who spends her free minutes planning new ways to torture those who have crossed Rupert, and to dispose of their remains. (When she's not doing that, the real boss is prone to call her from wherever and demand phone sex). There are also Russian mafia assassins, a James Bond-for-hire and an ancestral curse.

The book features Stross's characteristic hectic multiple plots and hidden motivations (though here, perhaps a bit more linear than in previous books) and occult-technothriller atmosphere. But it also has a genuinely sad family history in the mix, featuring a lost sibling (there we go again with the Peter Pan stuff!), a broken family and aforementioned curse. I don't want to spoil the story but I found that one of the characters who I strongly disliked at first turned out to be very sympathetic and - by the end - perhaps even redeemed. (Perhaps. We'll see, if they recur in a later book). It also has - again , that outsider's view - a grim appreciation of the realities of poverty in 2020s London. I know that in Laundry books, Bob has grumbled about Civil Service wages, but he had a reasonable house provided. Here we find Wendy, for example, very hard up, having to juggle between eating and having the heating on ('Poverty was expensive') and encounter the outskirts of the UK's failing adult care system with a frank appraisal of a home ('Eve did not - could not - believe in a loving God because she visited Hell every second Sunday of the month to take tea with the damned'), and magic-addled victims of K-syndrome wandering the streets. (Yes, Mr Stross, I want to know more about Professor Skullface as well!) 

In reading Dead Lies Dreaming I think I benefited from having first read the Laundry Files proper. I knew the world and the setup, and the full significance of certain things that are explained here but only briefly (as well, of course, as knowing where the arc of this world is bending...) Perhaps a reader coming to this world fresh wouldn't feel they were missing out on anything but they might wonder about the emphasis on one or two things.

In short, I enjoyed this book. There is some sharp writing here, quite a few places where I giggled out loud, well imagined characters (though, as I've said, some could have had more exposure) and a pacy plot. It was also good to be back in the horrific, grotesque world of the Laundry with its barely contained paranoia, its horror ruling from Downing Street, its sense of impending doom and of a dissolving society (heightened here by rampaging gangster capitalism). The slightly cooler, street-level view of that world gives a more rounded picture, perhaps than the shenanigans of Bob & Co and reveals it to be a world curiously unlike our own (see for example Imp's frustration at Del's 'perpetually seething low-key state of rage [which] was a potential lethal weakness'). 

Stross is back with a book that shows how this saga, begun in The Atrocity Archives some fifteen years ago, continues to evolve, becoming, if anything, more and more relevant.

For more information about Dead Lies Dreaming, see the publisher's website here or Stross's blog here.

Review - The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files)
Charles Stross
Orbit, 30 October 2018
HB, 454pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book (thanks Nazia!)

Stross's Laundry Files are now, I think, his most numerous and long lasting series, running to eight or nine novels (with The Labyrinth Index) and several novellas and short stories (depending how you count the stories in The Atrocity Archives, the first book).

While always having at its centre The Laundry itself, the UK's occult service ("occult secret service" would be a tautology, no?) which is lovingly portrayed with all its bureaucratic quirks and terrors, the books really come into their own in disassembling and rebuilding the Lovecraft mythos to fit a world of coders, geeks and cubicles. Stross has lots of fun with this (and with geek culture more generally) but there's no disguising the cosmic horror that increasingly hangs over these books.

As The Labyrinth Index opens with a particularly chilling execution scene, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is active and the Laundry has fallen, with the Black Pharaoh, N'yar Lat-Hotep, assuming power as the UK's Prime Minister. The New Management is in charge, the lesser of two evils, apparently. Well, at least it's a change from the previous Government, and should liven things up? They can't really be that bad?

I mean, things can't get any worse, can they?

Can they...?

I really take my hat off to the way Stross has followed through the logic of power politics to root his Lovecraftian singularity in a firmly credible, modern day setting. The world of the Laundry Files is not all crazed cultists in the woods but well-financed televangelists, crooked bankers and, of course, venal politicians. Very much like our own. And over the series the cast of characters in these books has expanded to reflect this, Stross introducing not only new human members of the Laundry staff but elves, vampires and superheroes too, all of it plausibly done with explanations for everything rooted in the idea that computation is magic.

In The Labyrinth Index, the Prime Minister commands His servants to investigate why the US President has gone missing. A complex, if desperate plan is devised to infiltrate the United States (with the US equivalent of the Laundry referred to as the Nazgûl, the line "One does not simply walk into Mordor" can be deployed unironically...) The activity here is underpinned by the usual meticulous degree of research, and it could, you know, all perfectly well work, given the premise of computational demonology.

Central to all this is Mhairi, the PHANG who did actually appear in The Atrocity Archives but then faded from sight for a while. She has the central role in this book, as Baroness Karnstein, the new PM's fixer but is supported by, for the first time, pretty much everyone we've met so far (including an elven vampire necromancer who's on the autistic spectrum. Great to meet you, Marisol!) In fact almost the only regular characters we see little of are Bob, who has new responsibilities as avatar of the Eater of Souls, and Mo. Hopefully they'll be back again soon but in the meantime it's good to see this story told through other eyes. Mhairi is an engaging lead, concealing a fair amount of her history from us but also clearly wracked by shock and guilt that she has to consume blood to live.

Guilt is fairly widespread in fact as the very act of submitting to N'yar Lat-Hotel takes its toll, even if He is a relatively sparing Lord. In the USA the Black Chamber have taken a different tack, and for once it's hard to argue that our friends in the Laundry are on firmer moral ground, even if the entity they deal with seems less far reaching in His evil. All choices are bad, everything leads to ruin, seems to be the subtext.

But while the world merrily rattles off to Hell in its accelerating handcart, we can still have some fun - the bone violin plays a good jig - and The Labyrinth Index serves plenty of that up, whether you're into a solid, clever plot, sly humour with a point (there's a running gag about the problems in the US - when people go to sleep, they forget who the President is, allowing his enemies to write him out of reality. So there are plenty of allusions to those who know what's going as being "awake"... but not everyone wants to be awake...) or just excellent storytelling.

At the same time, the book moves us forward into Stross's Apocalypse. The tipping point in this universe was reached, I think, a couple of books ago, but so far it hasn't been clear what exact form the catastrophe might take. Now things seem to be getting clearer, and the pace picking up.

In short this series shows no sign of tailing off, rather it seems to be getting stronger and stronger. I really can't wait to see what Stross serves up next.

Review - Dark State by Charles Stross

Dark State
Charles Stross
Macmillan 11 January 2018
HB, 349pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Dark State.

I always look forward to Stross's books, and I've been following his stories of world walkers since the start of the Merchant Princes sequence (in its original, six volume, form). So this is the 8th book in that series I have read, and I'm glad to be able to say that Stross is successfully keeping the books fresh, while engaging with events whose seeds were sown right back at the start.

He's done this by successively widening the scope. We began with one woman, Miriam Beckstein (now Burgeson) who originates in what looked then like "our" timeline and her discovery of her place in the relatively parochial, parallel timeline kingdom called the Gruinmarkt as part of its "world-walking" Clan. Over the original series the story broadened from fantasy-like beginnings to a technothrillery narrative which took in nuclear terrorism, drug dealing and ultimately revolution (in a third, steampunkish timeline).

Empire Games, the first part of this new trilogy, went further, into the world of superpower rivalries (both within and between timelines), revolutionary politics, and counter-espionage. Dark State develops that, while also bringing to the fore the possibility of conflict with a scarily advanced civilisation from yet another timeline - one which would make events so far look like neighbours arguing over an unruly hedge. That may come in book three, or be the focus of a future trilogy - let's wait and see.

So much for context. What is Dark State like? As with the previous volumes, it's an assured, well-written story about competent people playing for high stakes. Rita Douglas, the daughter Miriam put up for adoption and who was brought up by Franz and Emily Douglas, is proving a capable agent for Homeland Security although the clash between the personal and the political is about to hit her hard. She has an additional resource to draw on in being part, via her adoptive parents, of the Wolf Orchestra, an East German spy ring stranded after the end of the Cold War. In Empire Games Kurt put the Orchestra on standby and now it's tuning up to play a final symphony.

Rita's counterparts in the New American Commonwealth (across several factions) and the regime in exile of the pseudo British kings are equally effective, making this book a game of chess played between very high ranking players. Almost everything is on the board from the start (Stross does reserve a few pieces) and the way the games goes very much reflects the character of the protagonists. By that I mean that while one's first impression is that Stross is doing a lot of telling not showing, that isn't in fact the case - what these people do is who they are, so we are learning about how a well imagined and diverse set of characters see their world(s).

For example, we have Elizabeth Hanover, a doubly exiled princess brought up among emigres and dreamers in Europe, apparently a minor piece on the board but very much taking her fate in her own hands. By the end of this book we have a clear picture of her and Stross is obviously reserving a big part for her in Book 3. If Merchant Princes was in part about deconstructing the "exiled nobility" trope in fantasy, Dark State takes that to a whole new level since Elizabeth is, literally, exiled nobility - in fact royalty - but won't be defined by that. In what may be a two fingered gesture to SFF conservatives, Stross explicitly makes Elizabeth and Rita women of colour (and yes, the context of the story totally allows for that).

Given Dark State's focus on espionage, tradecraft and general chicanery, it's not surprising that a lot of space is dedicated to surveillance (and how to mitigate it). All of the protagonists are playing this game on different levels to such a degree that tiny advantages or disadvantages make a big difference in the outcomes. It's clever, engaging, well thought through and fun to read (as well as potentially useful - "every phone was, by definition, a wireless bugging device", "orient, observe, and decide before you act"). I do have a slight reservation which is that we get something close to a stalemate: it all rather cancels out and the resulting plot turns in a number of key places on essentially chance developments. But maybe that's just true to life! ("The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happeneth to all...")

There's a wider point beyond this. Dark State is a world - a universe - a set of universes - which make political points about such matters as democracy, economic development, and the surveillance society. Stress has thought long and hard about this stuff (as readers of his blog will be aware) and offers plausible, and often troubling, conclusions. For example, the New American Commonwealth is about to lose its First Man (its equivalent of its President, although it's more of a "guardian of the revolution" role). Will a newly established democracy manage this transition or will factional rivalry turn into civil war?

The author gives us few outright heroes or villains: I would have said "no" but there is Rita's boss Col Smith who seems to have been responsible for the nuking of the Gruinmarkt in Merchant Princes. We may sympathise with the survivors of the Clan because they're Miriam's people, but they are, as one sceptical figure here notes, an aristocratic-minded sect within an egalitarian society (in the same way as they formed a state-within-a-state in the Gruinmarkt). At the beginning of the book Stross illustrates, using the Wolf Orchestra as an example, how such a sect can survive and keep itself safe within a wider society. He's essentially set up a situation where an alternate timeline (the New American Commonwealth) introduced as an apparent refuge for the world-walkers when their own was nuked by the US becomes itself an active and interesting project which the reader will want to see survive, Clan or no. Given Col Smith's record that seems an iffy proposition and if I were one of the Clan's opponents in the Commonwealth, I'd be pointing out that the hostility from the US is primarily directed at the Clan and that they might be becoming dangerous guests...

Individuals may be in shades of grey but there is however a clear denunciation of the extent to which, in this timeline, Ubiquitously Surveilled America has descended into an authoritarian state: the Fourth Amendment is a dead letter, one character here is spirited away into "night and mist" (and may face "destructive debriefing and recycling), we're told that "everything is terrorism these days: downloading, uploading, jaywalking with intent to cause fear", a sinister sounding "Defense of Marriage Act" is in force. At one point, visiting a club with Angie,  Rita welcomes "the comfort of public affirmation, of having a lover whose hand she could openly hold (at least in safe spaces like this), of having someone she could get sweaty on the dance floor with and who would take her home afterwards..." It's an excellent flash of personal experience and anguish to juxtapose against the grand themes of politics and espionage, even if we suspect Angie may find herself used by the spooks as leverage to control Rita.

The US Administration here is also riddled with conspiracy theorists, adherents of fringe religions and so forth, so much so that Rita is tasked, alongside obtaining valuable intelligence about the Commonwealth, with verifying a whole range of bizarre beliefs and theories the need to pander to which hinder Col Smith's operation at times (contrary to popular belief, fascism is not "efficient", and Stross highlights this in passing).

Some of this is genuinely funny, and as ever, Stross also makes the reader smile knowingly at some of his references: in this world, Ruritania is apparently a real country (one can travel to Strelsau but Elizabeth would rather not), there's mention of the "game of Empires" which must go one better than one of thrones, a Slaveowners' Treasonous Rebellion which was NOT THE SAME AT ALL as the US Civil War (even if it it is an excellent description...), there's a warning against curiosity because it is "felicidal" (think about it!), we have Brilliant unironically echoing Bogart when she says "Play it again... Play it Sam". More soberingly, there's a description in the historical Appendix of what happened after the French invasion of Britain which placed customs barriers on the canal system, "breaking up what had hitherto been the largest free trade zone in Europe" and causing economic disaster. (Hmmm...)

To sum up: this is an intelligent, sharp SF-espionage-thriller which nails some dark tendencies in present day politics and use of tech while building up an even more nightmarish threat in the depths of the timelines. Strongly recommended.

Review - The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross

Image from http://www.orbitbooks.net/

The Delirium Brief
Charles Stross
Orbit, 13 July 2017
HB, 435pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

What can I say? Strauss's Laundry series gets better and better with each volume.

The Laundry is the section of the British Civil Service that deals with funny business - monsters, magic and unspeakable beings from beyond the stars. The books are, if you like, techno thrillers - if your tech is necromancy, and the thrills come from abstract maths.

In the latest book, we see the aftermath of the attack on Leeds by an elven host in The Nightmare Stacks. And if that was a spoiler then stop now and go and read the earlier books - you shouldn't be here. If you read any further your eyeballs will catch fire, unless you've applied the correct wards, OK?

Now, assuming you haven't been blasted into another universe which has too many corners, I'll continue.

This is the eighth volume in the series (with a few novellas and short stories besides) and what strikes me is how the storytelling has evolved, in two ways.

First, the theming of the books. Beginning as brilliantly written pastiches of different espionage authors, the series then moved onto books each featuring a well known fantasy creature. It has now dropped the pastiche/ monster of the day thing - fittingly, since the Laundry is exposed to its enemies as never before and confronting a new level of threat. It's time to come out in the open.

Secondly, the books have also shed what was very characteristic wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels plotting, where every paragraph seemed to hint at a secret, for something a little more straightforward. There are still of course plot twists, and indeed deeply shocking reverses and hidden agendas, but it's a little more "what you see is what you get" with the psychic space thus cleared allowing a greater focus on character (Mo and Bob are one of the great couples of modern fantasy: genuinely real, fleshed out people, albeit with bizarre problems) and on how those characters shape up in view of the coming threat.

The trademark cynical humour is still there, but accompanied now perhaps by a new, sober mood. In my view, it's this ability and willingness to shift tone that keeps this series fresh despite its now considerable length.

This book also brings together for the first time most of the character ensemble which has been forming over the last few volumes - so we meet againAlex and Mhari, the blooddrinking ex-bankers, maniac pixie dream girl Cassie who is dread leader of the aforementioned elven Host, as well as Persephone Hazard (Hooray!) and her sidekick Johnny. There are also several other figures from Bob Howard's past who I won't name (spoilers: but also, something may be listening).

Best of all, we see Mo again and we're back inside Bob's nightmare-haunted mind. Darkness is gathering, and business he thought dead and buried - or at least safely thrust into a cursed dimension - comes back for revenge. Exposed to Government displeasure and a hostile Press storm (there is a very funny passage in which Bob Does Media, specifically Newsnight) the Laundry has for the first time to account for itself. Having had dealings with the eldritch bodies that hold HMG accountable, I smiled to see our favourite necromancers, for the first time, come up against little things like democratic accountability and the need for things to be seen to be done.

It's all, of course, in service of a deeply threatening move by a sinister cult, and they should have seen it coming, but the sheer speed of events puts our heroes on the back foot very quickly. Stross gets some digs in here at the outsourcing process: underfund something, make the service bad, then invite in the boys and girls with the spreadsheets to cream off the work, making a fortune in the process.

If only that were the worst threat here.

By the end of this book we've seen Bob - and Mo - and all the rest pushed to the edge, in several ways, personal as well as professional, and - again on both fronts - there is a real sense of peril which isn't tidied away neatly on the last page. This is certainly the darkest Laundry book yet - despite the vein of humour that does run through it - and in its writing, I'd say, easily the most assured.

And the timing couldn't be better. The books shows a trusted Government organisation seriously challenged by flaky and dangerous outsiders. The organisation we depended on to keep us safe is vulnerable to subversion from above, by the arrogant, the greedy, the stupid. Does that remind you of anything? And more, at a stroke, the Laundryverse becomes a grimmer place - through this series, despite the grim warnings of unspeakable horror, we have perhaps come to see the Laundry as if not a certain shield, a pretty good one. Now... well, read the book and see for yourself.

In passing, I smiled that - despite what I said above - there is a little bit of classic spy fiction resonance here, in that parts of it reminded me of George Smiley & Co running their clandestine operation against the mole-infested Circus from a grubby hotel.

Stross has said that he'll never do Le Carre in this series, and yet...

You can read a sample of the book here.

Review - Empire Games

Image from http://www.antipope.org/

Empire Games (Empire Games, No 1)
Charles Stross
Tor UK, 26 January
PB

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy via NetGalley.

One of my most anticipated books for 2017, Empire Games picks up the story of the world-walking Clan seventeen years on.

In Stross's multi-timeline Merchant Princes sequence (originally published as 6 books, collected as The Bloodline Feud, The Traders' War and The Revolution Trade) we saw the collision between the Clan and modern US society. It's 2020 in the four alternate timelines we saw in the earlier books. Not much is happening in Timeline 4 - subject to 2000 years of nuclear winter - or Timeline 1 - the Gruinmarkt, nuked by the US in 2003.

But lots is going on in a world close to ours, where the Department for Homeland Security is putting together a plan to pursue the Clan. And in that of the New American Commonwealth, where the Clan took refuge - and where Miriam has risen to a high position in the revolutionary government.

The players are ready. The board is laid out. The Empire Games begin.

It's very enjoyable and very readable. The main protagonist, Rita, has a heritage that, as we soon learn, makes her something of an outsider in a fiercely inward looking and distrustful society. Part of that's visible - her skin colour - part of it's less obvious. If you want a glimpse of the atmosphere in this book, look at the cover image above. Security cameras. Cars moving along, with little ID tags. A crosswire... the alternate US has become a panopticon state, everything and everybody surveilled in an effort to spot worldwalker activity. If you apparently don't fit in, you'd better work hard to keep your nose clean and your profile harmless.

Strangely, it's an atmosphere that makes Kurt feel very much at home. But then he's a defector from the former GDR, East Germany, and familiar with the ways of the Stasi. A comparison Stross makes very pointedly: but also one that enables a survivor with a good grasp of old-fashioned tradecraft and a developed geocaching hobby to achieve quite a bit under the radar. What part will Kurt play in this evolving story? We don't know yet, but I think he'll be important... not least because he's Rita's adoptive grandfather.

I quickly warmed to Kurt and Rita: they're both competent, serious players of the Empire Games. Indeed, I found this book as a whole pretty compelling from the start. In mode it closely resembles a technothriller, with a lot of patient exposition of methods, technologies and goals as Rita comes to the attention of the DHS who soon have plans for her. Beneath that, though, there's the portal fantasy setup of the Merchant Princes and behind that legend, something that begins to look very like hard(ish) SF. It's a credit to the writer that he manages to keep these balls - and more - in the air at once, while still spinning a very readable story, even though the first half of this is largely setup. Is that too much? For some authors/ stories perhaps, but not here. It's all fascinating and, as I said, very readable (and this is the first in a trilogy, so not disproportionate).

Above all, I think Stross has captured something about the atmosphere of the times. No, we haven't been attacked by extra-dimensional drug smugglers with a stolen nuke: but the drivers are there, the impetus towards surveillance ("if it only saves one life..." "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear..."), the converging technologies, the rising distrust of the strange, the stranger, the out-of-place ("if you see something, say something"). We're on a knife edge, and the shows one side on which we could fall.

There's also beautiful, inventive clever and, in places knowing writing, whether references to people vanishing into "night and mist", to the "white heat of a technological revolution", to a "Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence" (or MITI) directing tech progress in the parallel timeline or a sardonic reference to the American "Heimatschutzministerium" (doesn't that sound chilling?) We get blended Churchill and Picard ("Action This Day" combined with "make it so") and to end with, "And so Kurt Douglas... raised his baton to summon the Wolf Orchestra back to life, to play the cold war blues one last time."

It's a fast, compulsive and intelligent story, at once familiar and alien. Cracking good SF/ Fantasy/ thriller (take your pick) and I'd strongly recommend.

Do you need to have read Merchant Princes (in either  incarnation)? It would be helpful but is not not necessary - the essentials are given here (though those are very enjoyable books... so why wouldn't you want to read them?)

The Nightmare Stacks

The Nightmare Stacks
Charles Stross
Orbit, June 2016
HB, 385pp
Source: Bought from Transreal Fiction, Edinburgh

This is a review of the seventh book in Charles Stross's Laundry series, featuring the covert department of the UK intelligence services that deals with supernatural challenges, especially the threat that the Great Old Ones will return to earth to eat our brains. While readers may have joined in at this point or with the previous book, The Annihilation Score - both are perfectly accessible - I think most will have followed from the beginning. So if you haven't, there may be some mild spoilers below and I would strongly suggest doing so (they're excellent - it won't be a chore!) before reading any more.

I'm intrigued by the way that the Laundry books have blossomed. I have always enjoyed the mix of classic horror, geeky in-jokes and organisational politics - Dilbert meets Doctor Who - but at the start these books were infrequent, coming out between other Stross projects. Lately there has been an annual book, and they've now widened their scope from Bob Howard, the original hapless geek protagonist ,to other Laundry members - first, Bob's partner Mo and now, to Alex the ex-banker and vampire. (The joke writes itself, really).

Doing that has given the books a shot in the arm, I'd say. Bob has accumulated skills and powers steadily until there was a risk that, like a 20th level paladin in a starter dungeon, he would just steamroller the bad guys away. Mo also has a lot of power and her violin solos are to die for (literally) but Alex is basically a beginner. His vampiricism gives him certain advantages, but also vulnerabilities, and he's relatively inexperienced.

He is, though, the man on the ground - in Leeds - when the somewhat Delphic "Forecasting Ops" warns that something may be about to happen - specifically, CASE NIGHTMARE RED. With a scratch team, he's about to take on the greatest threat to the British mainland since 1066...

I enjoyed this book. I really enjoyed it. There was just the right balance - for me - between action (BIG battles! Shooty things! Planes! bangs!), intrigue (Alex becomes entwined with the enemy agent First of Spies and Liars in a kind of reverse James Bond scenario), humour (Alex's family life is also going through a crisis, and you can't expect Mum and Dad to lay off sorting out their children's love and professional lives because of a mere incursion form another dimension, can you?) and deadly, dull bureaucracy (I shudder to imagine the post-event review coming after this book closes...)

Stross also continues to slot folklore and SFF/ horror tropes into the framework of his imagined universe, where magic is equivalent to advanced mathematics and the rapid increase in both conscious brains and computer hardware is fast creating a critical mass of computation that has thinned the walls of reality. In earlier books we've had superheroes (the ability to manipulate reality creates beings with all sorts of new powers), vampires and now... but I won't say exactly what. Just take my word. It's impeccably worked out, chilling in conception and inflicts real panic on the streets of Leeds.

It was also fun to see the imagined response - detailed and convincing - by the British armed forces to the scenario: the usual state of directed panic as whatever resources are available are thrown at poorly understood threats with unfortunate Tommy Atkins left to put things right:

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute!
But it's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot...

In sum my message is: buy this book. Then turn off Twitter, lock your door, cancel any work and just read it. You won't want to stop till it's done.

I can only guess what's going to come next. I think events here have now blown the Laundry's deniability to bits: I want to see how they operate under a spotlight...

Review: The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross

The Annihilation Score
Charles Stross
Orbit, 2 July 2015
HB, 400pp

Bought from Transreal Fiction, Edinburgh

To a degree it seems silly for me to be reviewing this. It's the nth in a series. Hardcore readers will know more or less what they're getting. Newbies are best advised to start at the beginning because SPOILERS. And I generally love Stross's books so I'm probably biased.

But there are some points of particular interest here. First, the book adopts a different viewpojnt - Bob, who we've followed from a wet-behind-the-ears IT support person to... something a bit more powerful and scary... is elsewhere, clearing up after the events of The Rhesus Chart. (Or so he says...) The book is told from the perspective of Mo, his wife, and picks up right where Rhesus Chart left. So, a new viewpoint character, but one who knows Bob and has been involved in some of the earlier and who can therefore give slightly different insights.

Secondly, there is CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. This has been dangled in from of us through the series as the prelude to the Apocalypse, a time when unmentionable horrors would break through to feast on our souls. As such, it seemed rather a daunting backdrop, but Stross makes it clear that we are (and have for some time) been living through the early part of CNG. That actually gives him a pretext to bring in pretty much any fantasy or SF trope he wants to play with, justified as a side effect of the thinning walls between the different realities. So here we get superheroes (and villains) while in Rhesus Chart it was vampires. Mo has been ordered to devise a plan for dealing with said heroes/ villains - and of course a plan in the British Civil Service involves loads of bureaucracy: I thought the shenanigans with Ministers and other bits of the Whitehall machine were rather well done and accurate (and I have literally been there: wonder who's been blabbing to Stross?)

This is all fast paced and compelling, although now that the books are taking their cue from a "monster of the week" there isn't, to my mind, quite the same depth or the same ramified quality to them as in the earlier ones, which each drew on a different classic writer of spy thrillers. It is pretty clear what the problem to be tackled is and how it will turn out (indeed, Mo tells us where we're going quite early) - the suspense is more in how, and who will get it in the neck. (Rhesus Chart showed that Stross has no compunction at killing off his puppets).

The different point of view adds interest to the book although I wasn't sure how well the book did at making Mo seem different from Bob. She has a similar knowing, medium-boiled tone which is perhaps understandable (they've been married 12 years) but I'm not sure - if the names were filed off - whether I'd be able to tell Mo's narration from Bob's. On the other hand there is possibly more emotional depth since Mo is more open about Recent Events in their marriage and about what's been going on with her professionally than Bob would ever be - this adds an extra dimension to the story.

So, at one level, interesting and different and an absolute essential if you're following this series, possibly slightly better than Rhesus Chart, although maybe it doesn't quite all that it set out to. And I was slightly irked by the American localisation: Charter schools, long explanations of what the Last Night of the Proms is from a British character supposedly writing a word diary for, presumably, British characters, copious use of "gotten", a police superhero named "Officer Friendly" (should be PC Friendly surely?) I assume the same version of the text has been used for UK and US editions, and as the US marked it much bigger, I can't quarrel with that. But I think it's a shame.

Finally: beyond the superhero theme this books also draws on another fantasy vein that I don't think the Laundry Files have visited before, one I've seen used VERY clunkily by others recently. And I have to say that Stross handles it adroitly, making the best use of it I've seen, and adding an extra edge of weird to his already pretty much weirded out universe.