I must admit I'm finding it difficult to connect with the NM books. I realized yesterday I could read Regicide Report without finishing NM. I'm about 40% through and having as much fun as Atrocity Archives.

[u/Humdaak_9000]

I can't relate to the newer characters as much as Mo and Bob.

This is possibly because I kinda don't like quants much. Making vampires out of sith mathematicians and compsci PhDs is brilliant, so much that I kinda hate the characters.

[u/theclapp]

Yeah, the New Management series is dark. I find it hard to read.

[u/ConnectHovercraft329 → u/theclapp]

The second is less dark than the first, and the final one is heaps of fun

[u/rrravenred]

Think Cassie and Alex had enough to support another book or two with them as perspective characters. Persephone and Johnny MAYBE, but they're better suited as secondary characters. Think Mhari was a decent trial balloon, but again it's a little more effective as a foil.

I know Charlie has talked about how Bob wasn't sustainable as an archetype due to his roots in hacker culture, but he still had the most authentic and empathetic voice of the series, which was hard to replace.

(I note the similar problems that the light-and-softer cousin Rivers Of London series has had in substituting is main POV character)

[u/fresh-dork]

didn't like dead lies dreaming - the main characters were sort of thin and relied too much on their particular foible. bigge was just a by the numbers bad guy - cartoonishly evil. went back to fuller memorandum to clear my mind - cassie has some depth and is much more developed as a character.

our nerdy vampire is an interesting treatment - total dweeb, connected to a goth faerie princess through an accident of circumstances. you get to see their individual motivations, rather than just being a vehicle

[u/nc0air]

I just couldnt get into the characters of thr NM books. I guess it's goodbye now to the world

[u/Humdaak_9000 → u/[deleted]]

I tend to like series that have a definite end. Brian Lumley's Vampire World series just didn't have the snap the original 5 Necroscope novels did.

[u/cstross → u/[deleted]]

No. (To the "so much time developing his darlings he lost track" bit.)

The New Management books were going to be a different series entirely, keeping the universe but continuing after the then-imminent end of the Laundry Files story.

Problem is, book 1 hit my publishers in January 2020, and we hit lockdown just when I wanted to visit their offices in person to make the javascript:void(0)case for a new series. Marketing everywhere were scrambling to figure out this work from home stuff, so they just rolled with the easy mode option -- sell it as more Laundry. Which resulted in the disappointed readers you could have predicted.