Reviewing these both togethor as I read them back to bank. Had picked up The Jennifer Morgue over lunch one day from the bookstore right next to where I do my banking (a truly dangerous arrangement I am finding, paycheck gets deposited and then large chunks of it spent right away as I step out of the bank and succumb to the siren’s song of books to read next door) and started reading it on my bus ride home at the end of that day.
By next morning on my bus ride into work I had finished it and got off a stop early to visit a bookstore again to pick up a copy of The Atrocity Archives which I started on the way home that day and finished that night.
These two books make up ‘The Laundry Files’ so far. The Laundry (known to the public under the cover name of Capital Laundry Service) is the department in the British Secret Service that deals with ‘the weird’. Except this spy of the Secret Service, Bob Howard, is rather unlike James Bond in that he isn’t a slick or dashing secret agent but rather a geeky demonlogist and computer hacker. Instead of fancy guns or pens that double as lasers he has a Treo. Admittedly, it’s a Treo that can be equipped with a webcam loaded with softward that duplicates a medusa’s stare but still… That’s a far cry from ‘spy sexy’.
But that is also a lot of the fun and charm of the books. To quote the cover of my copy of The Atrocity Archives, “Saving the world is Bob Howard’s job. There are a surprising number of meetings involved.” The Laundry is a bureacracy and Bob works in it’s IT department. Some days that means his job is traveling to strange places and making sure they don’t invade, other days it means making sure the office’s servers are working as intended.
The Atrocity Archives is the first Laundry Files book to come out and it contains two short stories (‘The Atrocity Archive’ and ‘The Concrete Jungle’) as well as short afterward by the author. The Jennifer Morgue has the full length novel of the same name, a short story (‘Pimpf’), and another afterword by the author.
Both volumes can stand on their own such that it doesn’t matter too much which order you read them in, I read them out of order myself and found that it didn’t spoil anything as tease me with hints of what I was missing.
Their is a third Laundry Files book that currently has a release date in July of this year entitled The Fuller Memorandum that I am greatly looking forward to.