Bob Howard is a spy, but not your normal run of the mill spy, and certainly not the type that wears a cummerbund and bow tie. He's a computational demonologist and his purview is more mountain dew then shaken martini. Bob works for the Laundry (formally known as the Chinese Laundry due to their location during the start up years during world war II), a super secret spy division that prevents, or manages, those magical incursions that we don't believe that happen. As Bob says "Magic is applied mathematics. The many angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set. Demonolgy is right after debugging in the dictionary" Bob has proven his worth to the boss, Angleton, and is slowly moving up the Civil Service chain, living with his girlfriend Mo (who also works for the Laundry, that story is told in the Atrocity Archives). Unexpectedly Bob is sent to a conference of other civil servants of the same "persuasion" and after a power point presentation gone very very bad ("Powerpoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic environment, one typified by interminable presentations with lots of fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissoves ... It's the tool of chance for pointy-headed idiots with expensive suits and skinny laptops who desperately want to look as if they're in command of the job with all the facts at their fiddling fingertips, even if Rome is burning in the background.")things get interesting. With a Smart Car that Q would have loved to have specced out and a super bad guy all you are missing is the Spy Hero and the Girl...or maybe not.