Showing results by author "Charles Stross" in All Categories

Bob Howard is an IT specialist and field agent for the Laundry, the branch of Her Majesty's secret service that deals with occult threats. Overworked and underpaid, Bob is used to his two jobs overflowing from a strict nine to five, and since his wife, Mo, has a very similar job description, he understands that work will sometimes follow her home, too. But when 'work' involves zombie assassins and minions of a mad god's cult, he realises things are spinning out of control.

London can drain the life out of you.... Bob Howard is an intelligence agent working his way through the ranks of the top-secret government agency known as the Laundry. When occult powers threaten the realm, they'll be there to clean up the mess - and deal with the witnesses. There's one kind of threat that the Laundry has never come across in its many decades, and that's vampires. Mention them to a seasoned agent, and you'll be laughed out of the room.

In a world where magic has gone mainstream, a policewoman and a group of petty criminals are pulled into a heist to find a forbidden book of spells that should never be opened. A new adventure begins in the world of the Laundry Files. Dead Lies Dreaming presents a nightmarish vision of a Britain sliding unknowingly towards occult cataclysm.

Hyperorganised and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. At least, she has reason to hope he's dead. But though she's now in charge of the Bigge Corporation, she's not free of him yet. Through the fecklessness of her brother Imp, combined with the intricate feudal law of a tiny Channel Island, it would appear that unbeknownst to her, she was married to Bigge - and that proving his death and releasing herself from his arcane bindings will take years and cost millions.

Hyperorganised and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. Now she's in charge of the Bigge Corporation, just in time to discover the lethal trap Rupert set for her long ago....

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when one of the great and the good is assassinated. You can kill a politician, but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians? The announcement of the solution to the traveling salesman problem heralds the imminent destruction of humanity.

Manfred Macx is a patent junkie, spending his days dreaming up ideas that will make him rich, very rich indeed. He patents them and then offers them up to anyone for free. In doing so, he has shunned the need for cash, preferring to live off the generosity of his benefactors. Enter uploaded lobsters wanting to defect, government investigations, and a dominatrix ex-girlfriend who works for the IRS and you've got yourself a hip post-cyberpunk tale.

Alex Schwartz had a great job and a promising future - until he caught an unfortunate bout of vampirism and agreed (on pain of death) to join the Laundry, Britain's only counter-occult secret intelligence agency. His first assignment is in Leeds - his old hometown. But the thought of telling his parents he's lost his job, let alone their discovering his 'condition', is causing Alex almost as much anxiety as his new lifestyle of supernatural espionage. His only saving grace is Cassie Brewer, a student from the local Goth Festival.

Nobody does it better.... Dr. Mo O'Brien is an intelligence agent at the top-secret government agency known as the Laundry. When occult powers threaten the realm, they'll be there to clean up the mess and deal with the witnesses. But the Laundry is recovering from a devastating attack, and when average citizens all over the country start to develop supernatural powers, the police are called in to help.

Miriam Beckstein has said good-bye to her comfort zone. The transition from journalist to captive in an alternative time line was challenging, to say the least. As was discovering her long-lost family, the Clan, were world-skipping assassins. Now civil war rages in her adopted home, she's pregnant with the heir to their throne and a splinter group want her on their side of a desperate power struggle. But as a leader or figurehead?

Miriam Beckstein is a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine. So when she discovers a huge money-laundering scam, she thinks she's hit the big time. But when she takes it to her editor, not only is she fired, but she starts to receive death threats. And that's just the beginning. To distract her furious daughter, Miriam's adoptive mother unearths mementos from her real mother, murdered when she was an infant.

Miriam was an ambitious business journalist in Boston. Until she was fired - then discovered, to her shock, that her lost family comes from an alternate reality. And although some of them are trying to kill her, she won't stop digging up secrets. Now that she knows she's inherited the family ability to walk between worlds, there's a new culture to explore. Her alternate home seems located around the Middle Ages, making her world-hopping relatives top dogs when it comes to 'importing' guns and other gadgets from modern-day America.

The American Commonwealth is caught in a deadly arms race with the USA, its parallel-world rival. And the USA’s technology is decades ahead. Yet the Commonweath might self-combust first – for its leader has just died, leaving a crippling power vacuum. Minister Miriam Burgeson must face allegations of treason without his support, in a power-grab by her oldest adversary. However, all factions soon confront a far greater danger.... In their drive to explore other timelines, hi-tech USA awakened an alien threat.

An unabridged audio collection of the "best of the best" science fiction stories written in 2011 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster, as narrated by top voice talents. In "Dying Young", by Peter M. Ball, cyborgs, clones, and post-humans collide with a dragon bent on revenge in a post-apocalyptic space western. In "Canterbury Hollow", by Chris Lawson, two lovers on a planet orbiting a killer sun share their few remaining weeks together before they die....

J. J. Wedick and Jack Brennan, two fresh-faced FBI agents, were about to go undercover. Their target: the charismatic, globe-trotting con man Phil Kitzer, who was responsible for swindling (and spending) millions of dollars and whom some called the world's greatest.

Date with Poison is the brilliant fourth novel in Julia Chapman's Dales Detective Agency series and is perfect of fans of M C Beaton's Agatha Raisin series and Gervase Phinn. A young teenager has gone missing. Can Samson O'Brien and Delilah Metcalfe find him? Spring is in the air in Bruncliffe. But not everyone is filled with the joys of the season. Implicated in the murder of a man in Leeds, the Dales Detective Agency’s Samson O’Brien is facing tough questions from the police....

Miriam Beckstein has said goodbye to her comfort zone. The transition from journalist to captive in an alternative timeline was challenging to say the least. As was discovering her long-lost family, the Clan, were world-skipping assassins. Now civil war rages in her adopted home, she's pregnant with the heir to their throne and a splinter-group want her on their side of a desperate power struggle. But as a leader or figurehead?

In the near future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers – in two different timelines – is imminent. One America is experiencing its first technological revolution, whilst a parallel United States is a hi-tech police state. But both are poised to wreak destruction.

Rita Douglas is plucked from her dead-end job and trained as a reluctant US spy. All because she has the latent genetic talent to hop between alternate timelines - and infiltrate them. Her United States is waging a high-tech war, targeting assassins who can move between worlds to deliver death on a mass scale, and Rita will be their secret weapon.

The American Commonwealth is caught in a deadly arms race with the USA, its parallel-world rival. And the USA’s technology is decades ahead. Yet the Commonweath might self-combust first – for its leader has just died, leaving a crippling power vacuum. Minister Miriam Burgeson must face allegations of treason without his support, in a power-grab by her oldest adversary. However, all factions soon confront a far greater danger.... In their drive to explore other timelines, hi-tech USA awakened an alien threat.