The Labyrinth Index
book, review, science-fiction
This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later with next to no spell/grammar checking.
5/5 stars
I loved it, just like all the previous Laundry Files books.
This one stars Mhari as the point of view character and as expected (the entire series has been told by unreliable narrators), she is completely different from what both Bob and Mo made her seem like. She’s awesome. She’s a PHANG (vampire) but offers a fresh perspective, quite different from the one by Alex.
And the paragraph above should highlight two things:
- if you haven’t read the previous books (at least from Fuller Memorandum onwards), start there, not with this one
- it’s growing even more into the realm of other characters
And I really like that. Every new character had a clean distinct and very personal voice. I’ve been having great fun getting to know these characters. And of course, the world is plunging deeper and deeper into a lovecraftian singularity which means more and more "oh, fuck" moments.
At the beginning of this book, it seemed like there cannot be any followups.
The Labyrinth Index mostly happens on the US soil again, so we get to see Nazgul again. We also get a tiny bit of background on Derek the DM — and especially his dice which are absolutely awesome. I want his d6 so bad.
So yeah, I’ve had a lot of fun with this one and I’m looking forward to the next book :-).
A note on the audiobook. There’s apparently a UK and a US version. I’ve read the UK one (narrated by Bianca Amato) and it’s been excellent. Some of the US accents were hilariously bad, but oh well.
Apparently though, the US version is narrated by an American, who’s trying to do British accents (the main character being a Brit) and it’s bad but not hilarious. If you get the audiobook, give it a listen first and make sure you pick the one you like best.
