I very rarely abandon books as I’m reading them, and I had every intention of finishing Thirteen, but then I got Charlie Stross’ sequel to the outstanding The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue. I didn’t mean to abandon Thirteen, it’s just I started to casually skim The Jennifer Morgue, knowing Stross well enough to know I can find a dry witticism within no more than two pages of reading, and I was immediately pulled in.

It’s rather hard to describe how it feels to put down Morgan one minute, and pick up Stross the next. Imagine walking through an unfamiliar, unfriendly French airport one moment, then sitting down with family for Thanksgiving dinner the next. It’s rather like that.

Stross is at least as much of a geek as I am, possibly moreso, and possesses the delightfully dry wit and rueful distaste for bureaucratic chicanery which seems to be standard issue among British authors (except, it seems, for Richard Morgan). Stross is like a cross between Neil Stephenson’s pitch-perfect geek humor and the funny bits (few and far between though they are) in Monty Python. It’s not that he (or Stephenson) is a humor writer, per se, but they both have a talent for sneaking exquisite nuggets of sarcasm into dialog and narration which combines forces with compelling plots to drive the reader forward.

I’ll wait until I finish The Jennifer Morgue before a proper review, but I can already say with some certainty that it’ll be hard to go back to Thirteen after this.