With the first outing being a tribute of sorts to Len Deighton, Stross turned to Ian Fleming for the second go-round of Bob Howard, a network admin for The Laundry, Britain's secret agency devoted to keeping chthonian and extradimensional threats at bay. Bob is now living with Mo, whom we met in The Atrocity Files, and is still doing his level best at saving the world while putting up with The Laundry's obdurate beauracracy.
The book begins in 1975 as a team of Americans and Brits work aboard a giant salvage ship aiming to reclaim the K-129, a Soviet sub that sank keep in the waters of the Pacific. Based on the real-life Project Azorian, Stross adds his own little touch with the wreck slowly being lifted to surface only to have it grabbed and pulled back down into the murky depths by tentacles.
Of course this wouldn't be a Bob Howard story if the submarine were really and truly a submarine.
The Laundry sends Bob to Germany where meets his new partner, Ramona. Curiously enough, Bob's wards indicate that she is not all that she seems. Ramona may be the most beautiful supermodel on the outside, but behind all that is someone or something else. It turns out she is a changeling, a creature that uses a spell to give itself a human appearance and she works for The Black Chamber, which is essentially the American version of The Laundry. Furthermore, she feeds on men, boasting that every man she's slept with has been dead within 24 hours. Bob and Ramona team up for their next mission and begin by becoming psychically linked to one another so that the thoughts and sensations experienced by one can be heard and felt by the other.
Ellis Billington is the Dr. No character here. He made his billions in software development and now he's gone and bought the ship used back in 1975 to attempt to recover the K-129/chthonian artifact. And so Bob and Ramona are sent to the Caribbean island of St. Martin to find out exactly what Billington is up to. In addition to zombified seagulls acting as sentries for the arch-villain, a little bout of skinny dipping ends up being a funny homage to Thunderball. There are no doubt many James Bond references which were lost on me never having read any of the books nor having seen any of the movies in some time. But, as in all of them, the bad guy reveals his plans just before leaving Bob and Ramona to die allowing them to apply their secret agent occult craftiness to an escape and thwart Billington's plans.
The Jennifer Morgue was a blast. Being an IT person myself, I feel Bob's pain at having to deal with lusers and he makes a nice contrast to Bond. Instead of drinking the finest cocktails, he ends up with a martini made with the cheapest gin on offer. Like Bond does in several stories, Bob plays baccarat except he is coerced into doing so by one of Billington's minions and loses his shirt. Stross goes perhaps a bit too meta when he has Bob fuss over the whole shaken vs. stirred thing, mentioning Bond by name, but, for the most part, the tributes and parodies are left for the reader to decipher.
Stross took many pages in the first book to explain his world where mathematical algorithms are magical and Lovecraftian beasties lurk at the thresholds of our world just waiting for a crazed cult member to let them in. Here he tones down his Irving the Explainer routine a bit as he hedges his bet. For readers not familiar with The Atrocity Files, Stross rehashes the rules of his world and gives some background on the characters. However, he gives the Cliff's Notes versions, essentially, instead of the lengthier indulgences of the first book. There's enough explanation to get newbies up and running without forcing veteran readers to overdose.
As with The Atrocity Files a short story is included and in this case it's "Pimpf". I think that all the technobabble that Stross left out of the novel ended up here. It's a fairly simple tale wherein Bob gets an intern named Pete who gets sucked into a video game. While it gets bogged down in Linux a bit too often, it's still a fun, light-hearted affair.
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