Okay, the President has not technically been kidnapped. Rather, the Operational Phenomenology Agency, aka the Black Chamber, aka the Nazgul, has worked a geas across the entire United States to make them forget that the President even exists. Mhari Murphy, Laundry Officer, PHANG, (oh, and Bob's ex from book 1) is the Bad Dude responsible for getting him back, along with a team of high-level Laundry agents doing old-school 'Set Europe Ablaze' style SOE sabotage.

This being The Laundry, nothing is simple or easy. The new Prime Minister, an avatar of Nyarlathotep, has taken a personal interest in Mhari's mission. Failure means that her skull, and the skulls of everyone she loves, will decorate the sacrificial arch Nyarly is building in the center of London. Success means advancing the plans of an Elder God, who's only virtue is that it finds humanity amusing. And messing up means getting caught in the United States, which is now run by the NSA crossed with mind-hacking Cthulhu cultists. There are fates worth than death, and being used as a fleshy avatar of Cthulhu is one of them.

Some parts really worked. Nyarlathotep is supremely creepy as Prime Minister. The Americans protecting the President, the last little cells free of the Nazgul's geas, feel properly paranoid and oppressed. They forget their mission every time they sleep, and are running on modafinil and fear. The ultimate plan of the Nazgul, a brute force attempt to wake Cthulhu by the inner solar system into a Matryoshka brain of orbital computers running invocations, is a nice call-back to Stross's first Singularity books. And the final set-piece, which involves a Concorde from 666 Squadron, is properly badass.

That said, while Mhari is decent enough as a protagonist, her concerns about being a bloodsucking vampire working for an inhuman monster, never felt more than obligatory. Yes, yes, she's a nice English girl so she doesn't like living by murder, and doesn't want to be an advance agent for an Empire that'd make the people who did the Opium Wars, mustard gas in COIN, and multiple famines in the name of the Free Market look like innocent schoolboys. But I don't really believe it. Stross is still only so-so about writing about America, though better than he was back in Book #4, as he sketches in a National Treasure style occult history of the US.

And finally the bad, and this is a thing where an editor should have put a foot down. The central human relationship of the book is between Mhari and Jim/Officer Friendly from Book 6. Jim is a super-powered flying tank, senior police officer, and silver fox of a man. Mhari has a "strictly physical, seriously guys" relationship with him that grows over the course of the book, and she also consistently calls him Fuckboy. Which, and Urban Dictionary will back me up on, is an entirely different species of lameass loser. I totally believe that Mhari would have a deeming nickname for Jim, but I'm roughly the same age she is, and there's no way an ambitious career-minded woman of my generation would use that specific phrase for someone who she ever wants to see again, even if she is a self-loathing monster.

There's also a doubt growing the in back of my mind about the long-term direction of The Laundry series, and the role of humans. Stross has always been concerned with the relationship between people and superhuman entities, whether they've been AIs running Economics 2.0, the Eschaton, corporate and government bureaucracies, or Lovecraftian entities standing in for any of the prior. His best heroes have dealt with these entities by being clever, basically by the hacker ethos. Mhari is not a hacker, she's a people person (or at least was). But Mhari solves her problems with superspeed, superstrength, and a basilisk gun. If the series going forward is just about PHANGs, that's a bad joke played on the readers.