The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross

The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross is another fun ride in the bewildering labyrinth that is The Laundry, a black-budget British agency for covertly defending England (and the world) from the scum of the Multiverse (that’s more capital letters than I have used in a single sentence for some years now).¹

Our hero Bob Howard has been promoted to junior management and Deputy Eater of Souls (read the previous books.  They explain it all, with footnotes), an even more frustrating exercise in demonic bureaucracy than he had thought possible, while his wife is still furious with him for roping one of their few remaining normal friends into The Laundry.  That would be fine if she wasn’t the  gun mount of choice for a particularly nasty personal weapon with a mind of its own.

While exercising his “free time” to look for outbreaks of demonic possession by trawling the big data in Her Majesty’s health archives, Bob stumbles across a group of people with “unusual symptoms such as super strength and speed, an uncanny talent for mind control, an extreme allergic reaction to sunlight, and an unquenchable thirst for blood.”² Worst of all, they are bankers.³

I recommend The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross as highly as possible.

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¹And two sets of parentheses.

²You know, vampires.

³You know, vampires.