A horrible start, but quite good eventually ( )

A gripping book as ever, even though the Peter Pan references clearly flew over my head, and I miss the early, more light-hearted laundry universe. But perhaps that is more of a symptom of our current dark times and perhaps Stross' difficult years.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and its characters. Somehow it felt a bit like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, what with its characters each having distinct superpowers that each were required at certain plot twists. It felt a little artificial in that way.

But in the other hand, it allowed for greater escalation and variety, which I enjoyed a lot. And I just love how Stross manages to write a classic science fictional "what if" extrapolation in this fantasy world. If all fantasy were as grounded and believable as this, I'd read much more of it.

Well done! ( )

This is a spinoff of the Laundry Files books. A new reader doesn’t need any background to start these at all. It is set after the events in the last Laundry book and there are some spoilers for the series but a new reader will not be lost missing out on anything. One of England’s power brokers is trying to get a book to help the god that he is worshiping that is against the god that now sits in the Prime Minister’s office. Rupert puts his assistant on the job of acquiring it for him. She ends up hiring her estranged brother to use his magic skills to get into a bank vault to get the map to where the book can be found. The book is in a shadow dimension connected to their old family home and you quickly find out that Rupert didn’t hire Eve just because she had good business skills.
Eve’s brother Jeremey, also known as Imp throughout the book is a frustrated director that wants to make his version of Peter Pan and there are tons of illusions to that book throughout the novel. There is Wendy a former cop with superpowers that has been hired by a security firm to catch Imp and his gang for all the robberies they have committed throughout London. Imp uses his powers to convince people to do what he wants. Wendy can make things appear and disappear but they don’t last forever in this world, Eve can move objects with her mind and other members of Imp’s gang have powers as well. All of this is becoming more commonplace due to magic coming back into the world with the return of the gods thanks to higher mathematics.

I’m interested to see if the next book and how the storyline will play out and if we will get anyone from the previous books to make a cameo.


Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss
( )

welp. i probably would have liked this spinoff series Tales of the New Management better if i hadn't come to it after reading right through the brilliant original series The Laundry Files to which it is only very vaguely connected. but anyway i did, and comparisons became inescapable, and this one was merely clever. the house at the center of it as a medium for time travel was an interesting idea, the rooms in the maze leading them backward in time. and the characters were kinda neat, although framing them within the Peter Pan story was a good bit over the top, and sadly the author seemed to lose interest in them all anyway once they arrived in 1888 Victorian London and it became more of a gangster caper grafted onto an espionage novel, with a bit of evil magic in the background to draw on if the author painted himself into a corner. i'll try the next book in the series, but i would not call this a good beginning. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2022/02/202221-dead-lies-dreaming-charles-stross.... ( )