Season of Skulls

Britain has become something stranger and darker than anyone planned: an eldritch god sits in Downing Street, petty crime is punished by death, and supernatural power is distributed unevenly enough to make ordinary life genuinely dangerous. Into this world steps Eve Starkey, newly in control of the Bigge Corporation after a brutal reckoning with her predecessor—except the past has a way of refusing to stay buried. Season of Skulls is a thriller about power, survival, and the costs of winning, set in a Britain that feels like a funhouse-mirror reflection of austerity-era anxieties pushed past their logical breaking point.

What distinguishes this installment is how confidently Stross handles tonal complexity—the dark comedy never undercuts the genuine menace, and the bureaucratic absurdism that defines the series has curdled here into something with real teeth. Eve is a sharper, cooler protagonist than the series has often given us, and her perspective lends the narrative a calculating intelligence that keeps the pages moving. Stross writes genre fiction that actually earns its worldbuilding, and this late in a long series, the mythology pays off in ways that reward patient readers.