View our feature on Charles Stross' The Fuller Memorandum.
National bestselling author Charles Stross brings back Bob Howard-"a British super spy with a long-term girlfriend, no fashion sense, and an aversion to martinis" (San Francisco Chronicle)
Bob Howard is taking a much needed break from the field to catch up on his filing in The Laundry's archives when a top secret dossier known as The Fuller Memorandum vanishes-along with his boss, who the agency's executives believe stole the file.
Determined to discover exactly what the memorandum contained, Bob runs afoul of Russian agents, ancient demons, and the apostles of a hideous faith, who have plans to raise a very unpleasant undead entity known as the Eater of Souls...
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From Publishers WeeklyStross's third Laundry novel (after 2006's The Jennifer Morgue) continues to describe the Kafkaesque absurdity of government bureaucracies, but the tone turns dark when series hero Bob Howard accidentally kills a civilian during a routine exorcism. Bob soon discovers that there's a mole loose in the Laundry, the ultrasecret British intelligence service that deals with the implications of magic being a branch of pure mathematics. At issue is a memo by the Laundry's founder that relates to something called the Eater of Souls. The only person who knows anything about this is Bob's enigmatic boss, Angleton, but when he inexplicably vanishes, Bob and his wife and fellow agent, Maureen, are left on their own to stop CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: the end of the world. The satisfying ending should appeal to fans of gory horror while making them question the definition of humanity.
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Imagine a world where gnarly Lovecraftian demons are all too real yet are routinely neutralized with high-tech wizardry by a supersecret British spy agency, and you'll get an inkling of the genre-bending territory Stross explores in his Laundry Files novels. In the series' third installment, Stross' recurring protagonist, the underappreciated junior-level Laundry agent Bob Howard, confronts a horrifying new threat from the netherworld. His latest assignment begins innocently enough when his supervisor sends him to investigate a haunted airplane at an RAF museum. Then a botched exorcism accidentally kills a bystander, leaving Howard facing a Laundry internal inquiry, and things steadily get worse. After Howard's wife and fellow agent returns home traumatized from an overseas assignment and Howard narrowly survives a run-in with a zombie hit man, the Laundry puts every operative on alert with Case Nightmare Green, a code name for a potentially world-ending showdown with the forces of evil. Stross enthusiasts more accustomed to the author's cutting-edge sf will nevertheless delight in this edgy, semiserious spoof of cold war spy thrillers. --Carl Hays