Dead Lies Dreaming (Laundry Files, 10)

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.

It's got the typical Hollywood cast: the evil white billionaire, the white sociopathic killers, the white sociopath whose colluding with the Russians!, and the wonderful gay people of color, most of whom are nutcases. Lots of them get killed and you don't care. It's a book without anyone you know or care about, and plot that leads nowhere except to lots of them being dead.

It's well written. What it's not got is any real connection to the Laundry. And characters you care about. Buy it used in paperback if you have to have it.

I agree with the other 1-3 star reviews, who have stated the situation well. Actually no Laundry Files here, only minor characters in a lackluster story. More importantly, not fun to read like the other books. More of a chore.I have loved the Laundry books, and this was a disappointing wait for the new book I am hoping the next one gets back on track, PLEASE!

This isn't the first time that the Laundry Files have started out a book by introducing a flurry of new characters. The Rhesus Factor gave us the Scrum, a bunch of almost entirely one-dimensional caricatures, with the only character we'd seen before being Mhari Murphy (who might as well be a new character, since apparently nothing Bob told us about her was true). The semi-viewpoint character, though, was the very interesting Alex, and the Scrum section was essentially an extended prologue intended to introduce us to Alex, the real Mhari, and the novel's central occult conceit before tying the story back into the Laundry mythos. There was no need for characters who were going to fade into the background anyway to be super-highly detailed.

Here, though ...

Here there doesn't seem to be anyone who ISN'T a caricature, there are no recurring characters to give us a safe place to stand, and probably most importantly, there's no reason for this to even be a Laundry Files book at all. The UK is overtly fascist and superheroes exist, and ... that's it. Otherwise this feels more like a near-future YA book, covering the adventures of boring teenage thieves with stupid nicknames with a cop as the token adult.

I read through as much as I could before losing interest and giving up, and that's not something I'm used to saying about Charles Stross books. Perhaps later in the book things turn around. But as for me, I'd spent long enough with these characters already, and had little hope of any improvement.

I'm having trouble finishing this one.

Of course there are people with magical/superpowers outside of the Laundry... and there have been for centuries, just not as easily, but this book hints that we'll learn why the magic went away (apologies to Niven). A little bit of Peter Pan (ok a lot), a little bit Brosnan- or Dalton-era James Bond, with lots of double-crosses. Lots of fun, only wish it wasn't as fast a read so I'd have more of it.

A little too off the beaten track in the laundry series, took a while to build up steam but a good read.

As others have noted, this isn't precisely a Laundry Files novel, although it is set in the same world. While previous books have switched up narrators and viewpoint characters, this one doesn't feature any of the regular cast and doesn't even involve the Laundry. The upside of this is that readers get a new and expanded look at this literary world. Compared to the usual "insider" viewpoint, it's actually a little refreshing to see the world of the Laundry through the eyes of relative outsiders.
There are a lot of familiar features. There's the usual black and gray morality; the bad guys are definitely card-carrying villains as wicked and depraved as you could ask for, but even the (relatively) good guys aren't exactly paragons of virtue and nobility. Magic may be becoming more common in this world, but it still comes at a price. Unlike Laundry members, many of these characters don't always realize the price and risks, which adds a certain tragic note. Even if the world survives Nightmare Green, there will likely be lots of people out there with varying degrees of K-syndrome...
There are some new twists to keep things interesting. We meet plenty of new characters, and learn at least a little about how they fit into the larger schemes and struggles. We also get to see some new and fascinating uses of magic.
Readers who are only interested in the adventures of Bob, Mo, and the usual gang could probably skip this. But if you want to view the world of the Laundry from a fresh perspective, it's well worth a read.

The book is similar to the other books in this series but follows new players. At first I was waiting for the hero (any hero) to show up. Then I realized this was an anti-hero book. There are no good guys, only bad & worse guys. I gave it four stars because I liked the characters in the other books more than I liked these. That said, by the end of the book I was rooting for the new guys. The ex-cop was a nice addition to the cast.

Not bad. It was a bit better than the last couple. He did use the whole LBGTQ alphabet of characters