A good follow up on the Laundry verse.

I have been eagerly awaiting this release for some times. I love the Laundry files and have been interested to see how the world spans out. This didn't disappoint. All the characters are new which at first put me off. However I think by using new characters it gave a compelling twist on the world building. As usual Stross shows us this fantastical world through the eyes of people with quite ordinary wants and desires. I hope this isn't the last book in the Laundry files as I'm desperate to hear more.

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Life under the new management

Brilliant. Beautifully constructed,funny, thought provoking & gripping plot. Amazed by the excellent conclusion. More please!

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Take a break between Laundry Files and this

Other reviewers have it about right - good to have another story in the Laundry universe. And the narrator does have a distracting tendency to put the stress on the wrong word / syllable. Mind you he’s not at the same level of irritation as Michael Jayston narrating the Bolitho books - who can barely manage a two syllable word without getting the stress wrong.

I’ve enjoyed this book more than many reviewers and I think it might be because I read book 9 of the LF, rather than listening to it (thank you other reviewers). I then listened to something completely different after listening to Book 8 - sadly the last excellent reading by Jack Hawkins.

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Great storytelling, somewhat distracting narration

Where to start? For me this has been the most enjoyable Stross novel in a long time, which is high praise given I buy them all religiously. In the other hand, while I appreciated the fun mock-ney accents from the otherwise 'RP' narrator, there were a fair few mispronounced words which detracted a little from the storytelling, most of which were technical or genre terms.

With all of this in mind I still highly recommend this book, but I wish Hachette had paid more attention to the narration, as this small errors took me out of the story momentarily, and we pay a premium for audiobooks.

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Another superb adventure set in the Laundry Files

Okay, first of all I've religiously collected every single one of the books in the Laundry Files series and I never thought I'd like any characters more than Robert (Bob) Howard. Well how wrong I was!

This book, the first in a planned series in the Laundry Files universe, features a story that is both compelling, amusing, and disturbing in equal amounts, with characters that bring the story to life.

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Some flaws however not too detracting from good story

Like many others I found the narrators pronunciation and grammatical emphasis at times annoying though as I became used to this it was less distracting. There were also a few production errors where phrases were corrected or repeated and original copy left in. The story flows at a good pace with an interest cast of new characters and the odd twist.

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strange pronunciations take you out of the story

This is a good story with a new set of characters and a different narrator to the other books. unfortunately there are a couple of strange pronunciations that are abrupt enough to jerk you out the story when listening. I can only assume that there are no 'proof listeners' involved in the recording process or they would have caught the mis-pronunciation of words like 'potentate' and 'grand guinol', I know this might seem petty but it really yanks you out of the moment when listeing.

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Still good, but slightly distracting errors

The story was good, narration mainly good, but there were some unexpected simple mispronounciations that were occasionally distracting.

Like "leads going to the battery", where "lead" rhymed with "dead", not "deed" (as it should have). These happened about every 30 mins.

Better editing please!

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Not as good as the earlier Laundry Files

Story was slow to start and not as engaging narration as previous books, but OK otherwise.

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Spoilt by narration

Narrator doesn't get the sense of what was written a lot of the time. An upper class 'what?' at the end of a sentence (e.g. 'He's a bit of a fool, what?') is said as if it was in response to an interruption. UK names like Anthony or Bernard are pronounced in an American fashion. A "286 computer" becomes a "Two hundred and eight six computer"

All minor issues but takes you out of the story frequently and repeatedly. In the end I abandoned the audiobook and went for the dead-tree version.

Fits into the Laundryverse as magic becomes more prevalent, and has some of the flavour of "Temps".

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