The Annihilation Score is a transition for Stross's Laundry series, with new threats and a new protagonist, as Dr. Dominique "Mo" O'Brian steps in for Bob Howard. The events of The Rhesus Chart have their marriage in tatters, but there's no rest for the wicked. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN means that ordinary people are gaining access to intuitive/somatic magic: read superpowers, and the Laundry sets Mo up the head of a new special agency to control super-villains and super vigilantes.

The plot follows Mo in a madcap scramble to set up a new super-police agency, while a villain by the name of Dr. Freudstein enacts various nefarious plots, and Mo's bone violin (this machine kills demons) tries to drive her insane. Meanwhile, her marriage is on the rocks, she's not/dating a glamorous supercop, and operating at newfound heights of the British government.

It's good book, over all, and some of Stross's better writing, but I have mixed feelings. The A plot: Freudstein, the violin, betrayal at the highest levels and a invocation to destroy mankind, happened almost too fast, without enough time to blink. Even a talented leader can get bogged down in the day-to-day and miss the strategic implications, but day-to-day administrivia is kinda dull, even if it involves setting up a superhero team. The B plot, all of Bob's exes in one place, and Mo's fling, are also not executed particularly well. The novel can't really decide if the relationship is over because Bob and Mo have grown apart, because they're in a marriage killing career, or because their mutual supernatural WMDs want each other dead. I'm not saying that this book needed to be the final word, but Mo should know when and why a relationship falls apart, and be able to tell us, the reader. This is a character driven book, and we saw a lot of Dr. O'Brian, academic honcho, a fair amount of Agent CANDID, reluctant supernatural troubleshooter, and I think relatively little of Mo, a middle-aged woman with a troubled marriage and a career she doesn't care for.

Finally, I think the superhero theme broke the stylistic rules of the Laundry-verse. Every other book has been based around the idea that magic and hacking and spycraft are interrelated. The covert war is based on information, not firepower, and the introduction of explicit superheroes with thinly themed powers, as opposed to psuedo-scientific explanations of folklore, is a thematic departure for the series that I didn't much enjoy. It's a little too pat, even if K-syndrome gets superheroes eventually.

I'm being too harsh on it, I know. This is a more mature, character driven book, and is actually quite good in many ways, but the Laundry series I love has a hefty doze of Gonzo in it (maybe less so, now the CNG is upon them). Seriously, Nazi holdouts in parallel universes, James Bond villains, unicorns as a parasitic shellfish, the Eater of Souls, PHANGS: all Gonzo as hell. And there wasn't enough of that in The Annihilation Score.