“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 (they don’t exist). But when a small team of investment bankers at one of Canary Wharf's most distinguished financial institutions discovers an arcane algorithm that leaves them fearing daylight and craving O positive, someone doesn't want the Laundry to know. And Bob gets caught right in the middle.”
The Rhesus Chart is the fifth novel in "Laundry" series of Lovecraftian spy thrillers, and set about a month after the previous book, The Apocalypse Codex. While the bureaucratic aspect of poking fun at corporations still exists here, I found this tale to fun is some aspects (the folks testing their new vampire abilities is a hoot), but also felt the book was one long prologue with the last quarter being the main plot.
There is also the issue –more so here than in the previous books- where narrator Bob needs to stop and tell the reader other parts of the story Bob was not involved in. And he is using information after the fact to fill in certain sections. Stross, as noted, has done this before, but here it becomes an annoying trope. Either write the book from one character POV or write it in third person. Skipping back and forth indicates to me that the story had problems and this was the only way to make it work.
It’s still a fun and funny book, and by now I’ve learned to really not pay too close attention to all the computer term gobble-gook (if I was a computer nerd and RPG player, some of this would make sense?), but once in a while, I wish he would explain some stuff. We also end with a loss of major character and what it means for Bob, and a potential martial problem between him and Mo (who, unfortunately, is hardly in this tale).
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