The Jennifer Morgue
core novel 2006 The Laundry Files
Record
| First published | 2006 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.02 (15,233 ratings, collected 2026-10-28) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781930846456 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
Bob Howard is paired with Ramona Random, a glamorous agent of the Black Chamber, to stop the billionaire Ellis Billington from using a deep-sea recovery ship to raise the Jennifer Morgue, a relic of a civilisation older than humanity lying on the ocean floor. Raising it would break the treaty that keeps the Deep Ones at peace with the human world. Billington has wrapped his operation in an occult field that bends reality toward the plot of a James Bond film, so the agent with the best odds of beating him is whoever fits the Bond role, and Bob finds himself cast in it while Mo O'Brien is drawn into the mission too. Written as a deliberate homage to Ian Fleming, the book also contains the short story Pimpf.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Laundry Files
- Series: The Laundry Files core; position 2 of 15 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Charles Stross
Awards (verified)
- Locus Award (Best Fantasy Novel), 2007: finalist; Locus reader-poll placement, ranked 2.
Notes
- Also contains the short story Pimpf and an essay; Pimpf is not registered as a separate work because it was first published in this book.
- From the series record (The Laundry Files): The main sequence about the Laundry, Britain's secret occult intelligence agency, from Bob Howard's first field mission to the agency's end.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Laundry Files: position 2 of 15: previous The Atrocity Archives (2004) · next Down on the Farm (2008)
- Internal chronology, within The Laundry Files: position 3 of 14: previous Dead Lies Dreaming (2020) · next Quantum of Nightmares (2022)
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Laundry Files
- Wikipedia: Charles Stross bibliography
- Reader ratings: Laundry Files series page
- ISBN-13 form of the recorded ISBN-10 0553378465 (same edition)
- Science Fiction Awards Database: Charles Stross
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