Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The first few Laundry Files were pretty good. Bob Howard was a great narrator on our journey through his strange world. The books were inventive and had a great deadpan humor. The stakes were generally pretty high, and the action carried through the entire story. The last few books, however, have been sloppy and uninteresting. Thin plots, no humor. Poor choices in POV characters. Stross has begun to suffer the fate of many series authors before him: after investing time in establishing the bad guys, he's reluctant to allow the good guys to actually vanquish them. The "bad guys" follow the "good guys" back home like strays and become the good guys in the next book. This lowers the stakes considerably. The Laundry Files universe features a high level of ambient ambiguity, consequently the stories need to be larger-than-life. Recent outings have been underwhelming, and this is the lowest-energy entry so far. No story. There's a macguffin, and we look for it. Kinda. There's no rush. We don't really care. It's not even vital to the end of the story. It's just the thinnest pretext to drape the real story over: the introduction of Stross' new fully-woke SJW Avengers. First they're the criminals our nominal cop protagonist is pursuing, then they're the protagonists and the cop is along for the ride. What little story line we get is short-circuited by a Deus Ex Machina and it turns out that the entire second half of the book was completely unnecessary, as were our shiny new woke characters. Oops. No stakes. Not only is the macguffin optional, the Big Baddie who sets the whole chain of events in motion doesn't really seem to care if the thing is found. There's no sense of urgency, there are no consequences for failure. In the completely ambivalent world of the New Management, all of the rules about good/bad and right/wrong are set aside, which makes for an exceedingly dull book. There's the nucleus of a much more interesting story contained in Eve's flashback than the one that the book's actually about, sadly. Not recommended.