Thanks to the Mother of All Demons trying to enter a gate to heaven located in Nevada, the entire city of Reno has been destroyed. Cèsar, Fritz, Suzy, and Isobel are right in the middle of it, trying to figure out what happened. If you’ve read the Descent series, you know what’s going on, but if you haven’t, that’s okay, too. Cèsar never has much information about anything and stumbles through every case, hoping he gets it right while eyeballing every sexy woman around him — and to be fair, Cèsar finds pretty much every woman sexy. Who screwed up in the Office of Preternatural Affairs and let this demon situation even happen? Cèsar is tasked with finding out, though the answer may be him.

So much has happened to Cèsar in this series that I’m forgetting some of it, which is not a problem. S.M. Reine will give you little reminders throughout the novel, but I will say, there doesn’t seem to be one driving force, like there was in the previous series (Descent, Seasons of the Moon, The Cain Chronicles). Each case is its own thing, though Cèsar will reference old cases, but basically in a “Hooboy, that was big!” kind of way. However, Reine kicks it up a notch in this novel because some folks in the Magical Violations Department think the “muscle” side of the Office of Preternatural Affairs are straight-up vile. Are Cèsar and his coworkers getting paychecks from an evil shell? He has to decide if he’s going to keep the people he cares for safe by lying about human atrocities committed in Reno, or rip the mask off the villains because it’s the right thing to do. All the while, he’s a massively good-looking dork. He says this about himself: “Agent Cèsar Hawke is a low-carb treat. Nothing but meat here, baby.” This is not meant to be serious, and the author has readers laughing at what a goon her character is.

And yet, because Cèsar doesn’t have one goal he’s aiming for through the series, the Big Bad Thing happening starts to lose what made it terrifying for the characters in the first place, sort of like in Marvel movies when the whole city is destroyed, then the whole country, then the whole world, universe, etc. At what point do readers think, “Wow, you’ve almost died so many times, nothing could be worse!” only for something worse to come along. I still enjoyed being in Cèsar’s mind, though, and the author never takes him too seriously. Otherwise, why would she write about a bureaucratic witch that is allergic to magic?