I seem to be awarding the Laundry books 4 stars an awful lot. The books are all good, and all have different small weaknesses.

The narrator in this book is Bob's wife, Mo. Mo is a combat epistemologist with a bone violin that can kill. At the beginning (and really, through to the end) of the book, she's suffering from PTSD and is dangerously close to burning out.

In this book, Stross is playing with the notion of superheroes. Case NIGHTMARE GREEN is ongoing, and the resulting uptick in supernatural energy is causing regular folks to manifest supernatural powers. Since superheroes are a dominant mythology at the moment, that's how people are interpreting these new abilities.

Mo is tasked with running a false-front agency which supposedly recruits superheroes and uses them to fight crime, but which really is watching for newly manifested powers and evaluating them for danger. Any superheroes they recruit are really icing on the cake, because the administrative team also doubles as a field team sent out to deal with strange phenomena. This team includes Mo, Mhari the vampire, Ramona the mermaid (both of these two are, coincidentally, Bob's ex somethings) and Office Friendly, a police officer who has turned up with superpowers who is attached to the office as a liaison for the police department.

Meanwhile, a mysterious entity known as Doctor Freudstein maneuvers for some shadowy goal, breaking into libraries and causing chaos. Mo dreams about her violin's possessing entity taking human form in dreams, acting as lover and as destroyer.

There was a lot more than usual about bureaucracy in this book. Mo works 80 hour weeks at this start-up, and her marriage to Bob is entirely on the back burner. They are at something of an impasse, her violin and Bob's new necromantic abilities have made it dangerous for them to be around each other. It's uncertain whether they can get through this. And Mo really does bury herself in work in an effort to avoid her marital and demonic troubles. It was actually kind of boring- I didn't care that much about which personnel would get their chairs put together first, and administrative meetings, even with Mahogany Row at the Laundry, were often rather dull. I know that this is actually the point of the books, but I'm becoming less entertained and a bit more weary of reading about the necessary logistics that must be behind the scenes of any operation.

And Mo and her support staff never talk about Bob. Never. It's like Stross lobbed a firecracker into the room and it turned out to be a dud. It's not that I want Mo's life to center around Bob, and I know that's the trope he's subverting. But then he pushes it to the point of it being odd that it's never brought up. It's nice to see these women acting professionally and relying on each other instead of getting in a cat fight. But honestly, Bob talks about Mo a lot more than Mo talks about Bob.

I actually do appreciate the look at a mature marriage- by mature I mean one that has lasted a long time. Bob and Mo see each other as partners as much as romantic opposites( maybe even more as partners). Mo doesn't have much in the way of hearts-and-flowers left in her about how she thinks about Bob. I think the reviewers who blame and deride her for this may be a bit unrealistic about how real women actually work. Women can love their husbands, sure, but that definitely doesn't mean that they don't notice the feet of clay as well as the best parts of their partner. I thought Mo was quite believable as a woman going through a rough patch in her marriage and unsure whether it would survive.

I'm not sure how well the comic-book heroes and demon violin worked together to form a plot. I'm not sure I want to read another book about organizational logistics. I think the joke is getting a bit tired for me. I know the series is really about how mundaneness interacts with the fantastic, but I'd like a bit more fantastic. That's the four stars. Oh, and once again, the main characters are bait. This happens in just about every book, and I've stopped being surprised by it. I'm ready for a different twist.

Interesting. Written "by" Mo this time. Interesting point of view, good solid ending.

The Laundry Files is one of my favorite series, but this book left me flat. First of all, Mo is a great character, but I read the series for the cool, nerdy absurdity that is Bob Howard. An entire book about Mo is.....meh. Secondly, the relationship issues Bob and Mo are dealing with seem forced and off model for the characters, but most importantly, THEY PISS ME OFF!!! I was not happy at the end of this book.....but, sigh, I can't wait to read the next one.

Por una parte, se agradece el cambio de narrador de Bob a Mo. Esta, como no es friki, se enrolla mucho menos con los infodumps (que eran muy entretenidos, pero te ponían la cabeza como un bombo). Por otra, la sección central del libro —básicamente todo menos el principio y el final— se hace pesada y deprimente. Le falta acción/desarrollo/intriga y le sobran administración, comisiones, reuniones, entrevistas, etc. Que vale, esta serie es fantasía urbana administrativa, pero en este libro la burocracia es excesiva. Como Mo se pasa casi todo el libro siendo la jefa, se marca muy acertadas (y deprimentes, insisto) reflexiones, como esta:

“Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds —and then taking their mess right on the chin”.

The Annihilation Score is a transition for Stross's Laundry series, with new threats and a new protagonist, as Dr. Dominique "Mo" O'Brian steps in for Bob Howard. The events of The Rhesus Chart have their marriage in tatters, but there's no rest for the wicked. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN means that ordinary people are gaining access to intuitive/somatic magic: read superpowers, and the Laundry sets Mo up the head of a new special agency to control super-villains and super vigilantes.

The plot follows Mo in a madcap scramble to set up a new super-police agency, while a villain by the name of Dr. Freudstein enacts various nefarious plots, and Mo's bone violin (this machine kills demons) tries to drive her insane. Meanwhile, her marriage is on the rocks, she's not/dating a glamorous supercop, and operating at newfound heights of the British government.

It's good book, over all, and some of Stross's better writing, but I have mixed feelings. The A plot: Freudstein, the violin, betrayal at the highest levels and a invocation to destroy mankind, happened almost too fast, without enough time to blink. Even a talented leader can get bogged down in the day-to-day and miss the strategic implications, but day-to-day administrivia is kinda dull, even if it involves setting up a superhero team. The B plot, all of Bob's exes in one place, and Mo's fling, are also not executed particularly well. The novel can't really decide if the relationship is over because Bob and Mo have grown apart, because they're in a marriage killing career, or because their mutual supernatural WMDs want each other dead. I'm not saying that this book needed to be the final word, but Mo should know when and why a relationship falls apart, and be able to tell us, the reader. This is a character driven book, and we saw a lot of Dr. O'Brian, academic honcho, a fair amount of Agent CANDID, reluctant supernatural troubleshooter, and I think relatively little of Mo, a middle-aged woman with a troubled marriage and a career she doesn't care for.

Finally, I think the superhero theme broke the stylistic rules of the Laundry-verse. Every other book has been based around the idea that magic and hacking and spycraft are interrelated. The covert war is based on information, not firepower, and the introduction of explicit superheroes with thinly themed powers, as opposed to psuedo-scientific explanations of folklore, is a thematic departure for the series that I didn't much enjoy. It's a little too pat, even if K-syndrome gets superheroes eventually.

I'm being too harsh on it, I know. This is a more mature, character driven book, and is actually quite good in many ways, but the Laundry series I love has a hefty doze of Gonzo in it (maybe less so, now the CNG is upon them). Seriously, Nazi holdouts in parallel universes, James Bond villains, unicorns as a parasitic shellfish, the Eater of Souls, PHANGS: all Gonzo as hell. And there wasn't enough of that in The Annihilation Score.

This was a new direction for the Laundry Files. At times I really enjoyed reading Mo's perspective and reading about the literal demon's entrenched in her marriage, but much of the middle of the book seemed like fill to me, just a cycle of complaints about being overworked and minor superhero encounters. The superhero theme didn't really appeal to me in general. The concept sounds like a good one but in the end it didn't fit seamlessly into Stross's occult alternate universe.

I look forward to reading Nightmare Stacks as the ending of this book will surely have strong consequences for all the future installments!

The weakest Laundry Files book by far. I didn't mind the POV shift from Bob to Mo, but the whole "oh there's super heroes now, oh there's been super heroes for a while now but ... uhh, Mo just didn't notice" thing felt like a crutch. Even worse, the book didn't really do a whole lot with the super hero thing.

Not awful by any means, because even Laundry Files with issues is still Laundry Files, but still I hope this is a momentary stumble and not the start of a bad turn for the series.

It took me a little bit to get used to the new viewpoint, but it ended up being fun. Stross' choice to have each book be almost a completely different genre within the same setting can make it feel a little all over the place, and it felt like the superhero theme here aged a little worse than the others.

Unfortunately I'm too into his "lovecraft with math" premise to put this series down any time soon.

DNF. This is not the Mo we were looking for. Petulant, immature, and sexually attracted to an eldritch weapon of mass destruction? That came out of nowhere.