Just read the new Charles Stross Laundry book "A Conventional Boy" and to be honest, I'm disappointed. It's really a short novella that's a small side story that repurposes other characters and happenings in the Laundry universe. The rest of the book is padded out with several previously published short stories that any Stross fan has already read years ago.
Neal Asher's "World Walkers" takes the poorly received "Owner" series and turns it into a multiverse jumping adventure trying to save the future of humanity. It's not bad, but feels slower and has to introduce a whole load of new stuff that isn't the Polity universe.
Far more engaging was Asher's recent "Jenny Trapdoor". A dead woman brought back and installed in a giant spider robot by insane AI Penny Black, nearly killed after a career of hunting Prador behind enemy lines, gets herself back online many years after the end of the Prador-Human war, and has to rescue herself while being hunted by her old enemies. A real page turner, a tightly written Polity war thriller.
Dennis E Taylor's fifth Bobiverse book "Not Till We Are Lost". If you've read the previous Bobiverse books, you know what you're getting with this. There's impending doom in the form of a newly discovered (but now abandoned galactic empire), an escaped AI with no moral compass beyond it's own survival, a new world of intelligent aliens to help survive a natural disaster, and a cliff hanger ending. I'd say my only criticism is that with so many Bobs around doing all kinds of different things all over the galaxy, there are a lot of different story threads going round, and some will be more interesting than others. Jumping between them often leaves you feeling that you're just tying to get though this bit of storyline so you can go back to the other storyline that you are more invested in.
Michael Marshall Smith's "Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence". Hannah Green is sent on holiday with her grandfather as her parent's marriage disintegrates, but it turns out her grandfather is the three hundred year old watchmaker who maintains a mystical machine for the devil which keeps the world's evil energy flowing into hell. Only now it's not working, the devil is missing (until he wakes up), and fallen angels are determined to destroy the world.
Another clever, dark supernatural tale set in the modern world. Smith never fails to write clever and beautiful prose, and this is no different. Suprisingly funny and disturbing, Smith paints an alternate, scarier world that exists on top of, and underneath the world we think we know.
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