The Regional Office is Under Attack!

Short plot summary: The Regional Office is a home for trained operatives (theoretically?) fighting Forces of Darkness and are under titular attack by other operatives (for reasons). The backstory follows operatives on either side of this fight, with some more historical papers in the middle to provide other background on the office. Overall, lots of action, fluffy, fun characters, nothing too serious.

I really enjoyed this book's wry humor and plot structure. I am always a huge sucker for interspersing character history flashbacks into the middle of a longer present day timeline. (Hi, Ancillary Justice). The prose reads in a stream of consciousness way where a character will think one thing and go wait no not that, this other thing, or insert wry asides about what's happening. It felt very much like something intended to be read out loud, as if the third person narration were written as a dialogue with the reader.

Almost all of the action takes place in the regional office or small towns, despite references to the office doing heroic feats off page, like stopping evil wizards (only named) and struggling against Forces of Darkness (never described). It's as if this were a D&D campaign that takes place entirely in a pub while the party just casually references historically massive events that they were involved with elsewhere, and where the action is just an all-out brawl with the table of adventurers next to them. I think this actually works with the wry comedic tone of this book.

I think overall I had no idea what to expect from this, but it was fun.

Bonus content warnings: This happens only twice, but there are some weirdly aggressive fat insults; there's also a fat coworker used as comic relief.