The second of the Laundry novels, this book sees our hero Bob Howard trapped (literally!) in a James Bond plot, complete with supervillian, fluffy white cat, and Cthonic artifacts from beneath the Earth’s crust.
It’s an entertaining read, but Stross isn’t really very good at constructing plots that hang together. There are some lurches in the narrative that are pretty baffling, and most damning of all, it’s not very scary. It’s more a pastisch than a good horror novel.