Angelbound

Purgatory settles its arguments the old-fashioned way: two souls, one arena, a fight to the death that decides where the wicked spend eternity. The reigning champion is Myla Lewis — part human, part demon, one hundred percent mouth, tail and all. She's eighteen, she's cut down thousands of evil souls for a system she's starting to suspect is rigged, and she has exactly zero interest in behaving. Then a company of angelbound warriors marches into her afterlife, their high prince Lincoln catches her eye, and the tidy borders between Heaven, Hell, and everything stuck between them start to come apart. This is Christina Bauer's afterlife, mapped across a cluster of linked series. Angelbound Origins is the spine — Myla's climb from arena gladiator to something the thrones of Heaven and Hell never accounted for. Angelbound Lincoln replays that arc from the prince's side of the sword; Angelbound Offspring hands the fight to the next generation, Myla and Lincoln's children among the new champions; and the Xavier Trilogy, the Angelbound Worlds books, and a shelf of short fiction round out the same cosmology. The register is snark first, romance a half-step behind: first-person wisecracks, gladiatorial action, slow-burn heat, and a theology run less like scripture than like a corrupt bureaucracy begging to be broken. It wears its heart and its attitude on the same sleeve. Newcomers start where Myla does — with Angelbound, book one of Origins. Everything else swishes out from there.