Holy Hitmen Inc.

A world earns belief one detail at a time, and Clay Blankenship has built this one from a very good set of details: a MARSOC fire team, a ritual circle drawn in blood on a dirt floor, and an angel named Sariel who arrives not with trumpets but with a contract. The hook is immediate and honest to its title. These are Marines who already know how to put rounds where the intel shop circled in red, and the book asks what happens when someone hands them sanctified ammunition and a rule: "No demon, no weapon, no shot."

That rule is the book's spine, and it is what lifts Holy Hitmen Inc. above its pulp-adjacent premise. The distinction between a rider (a demon clinging to a man, extractable with the Latin verse and a physical "pull") and a throne (a host so hollowed that the seat must be broken to free the soul) is a coherent magic system with costs. Jace bleeds from the nose every time he pulls, and the mechanic generates real dilemmas rather than decoration.

The Keller chapter, "The Cost of Hesitation," is the strongest execution of that logic. Jace stands inches from a finance minister's chest, the demon taunts him, Lydia counts down the camera loop, and he chooses to wait. The markets crash anyway. Sariel's rebuke, "You are soldiers, not gods," lands because the book lets a good-faith decision go wrong.

The broader architecture is smart: hell colonizing finance, churches, and logistics (Sable Arc, the "gospel of profit"); heaven fractured by Cassiel's "acceptable losses" faction; the CIA as a third interested party. Boomer's Sharpie-labeled Holy Hand Grenade is a running gag with an earned payoff in the arena. The final epilogue's glimpse of the "other board" delivers on the preface's promise of a finished arc with the war left open.