Hellhunter Chronicles

The powerful float to the top like everything else that refuses to sink.

Cane Jonathan arrives in the quarry city to hunt a killer who walks through silence and leaves the city's officials dead behind their own bolted doors. The Crown wants the work done discreetly, by an outsider it can disown the moment the truth grows inconvenient.

The deeper he digs, the more the murders reveal a design. Every victim signed the same kind of order; every thread he pulls runs a little higher up the ladder. And behind the killing sits a machine of clerks and generals and quiet bargains that turns every death into someone's promotion. Cane has spent his life learning a single bitter lesson, and Stillstone teaches it to him again: the things he reaches for tend to ruin in his hands, while the men who deserve ruin keep rising. He will trade favors he should keep, wake powers he should leave sleeping, and discover that the hardest part of hunting monsters lies in counting how many of them followed him into town.

Routes of Ruin, the second Hellhunter Chronicles novel, is a dark fantasy noir of conspiracy, corruption, and the slow, gilded cost of getting exactly what you asked for.