The Annihilation Score

The Annihilation Score is the sixth novel in Charles Stross's Laundry Files series, published by Orbit and Ace Books in 2015. Like other books in the series, it blends elements of the Cthulhu Mythos with spy fiction and bureaucratic office comedy; this volume adds a parody of comic book-style superpowers to the mix.
Set in 2013 after the events of The Rhesus Chart, the book is the first in the series not to have Bob Howard as its narrator/protagonist. Instead, the story is told by Bob's estranged wife, Dominique "Mo" O'Brien, who has been picked to head up a task force to deal with the sudden emergence of superpowers as the world heads closer to a Lovecraftian apocalypse. 
Joining Mo on this task force are two of Bob's former love interests: the human/deep one hybrid Ramona Random (from The Jennifer Morgue), and Mhari Murphy, who was introduced as Bob's girlfriend in The Atrocity Archive and turned into a PHANG (Stross's take on vampires) in The Rhesus Chart. Complicating things further, Mo develops romantic feelings for Officer Friendly, her superpowered liaison to the Metropolitan Police.
Mo finds herself involved against her will in a government plot to cast a mind control spell on the British public in the name of law and order. The scheme involves coercing Mo to play the score of an operetta based on The King in Yellow on Lecter, her sentient bone violin made by Erich Zahn--a performance that threatens to invoke the King in Yellow himself.
A subplot of the novel involves the task force recruiting and vetting potential superhero candidates; one such interview turns disastrous when the candidate, known as Fabian Everyman, turns out to have nearly irresistible powers of persuasion. Everyman is just barely neutralized and imprisoned--and turns out to play a very major role later on in the series.
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Novels
Category:Charles Stross works