A killer blessed with angelic powers leads a military team to defeat an oppressive enemy in this debut novel.

With his special spiritual gifts, narrator Micah Dawson has been trained at a clandestine facility to learn angelcasting—magic through an angel created by Jesus—and skills such as martial arts, close-quarters combat, and weapons. According to his angelcasting Master, Micah is “an avenger sociopath,” meaning he has a conscience but can kill without remorse. As a protectorate among a larger community of worlds, Earth has a responsibility to join good aliens in the fight against criminal aliens who seek to take over other planets, aided by Satan and his servant Nemesis. Now Micah has been called up to lead a team in defense of a planet whose civilization is composed of two free countries, the Federation and the Commonwealth, and seven totalitarian nations. In parallel with Earth’s World War II, the different sides are called the Allies and the Axis; their weapons are also at a 1940s level, plus black magic. Micah heads a team of only eight specialists to assist the Resistance while discovering and destroying an enemy with much higher numbers. But they’re aided by artificial intelligence and overwhelmingly more sophisticated equipment—as well as Micah’s powerful angelcasting abilities. Together with Francesca, an enemy intelligence agent turned ally, Micah spearheads a long series of complicated, dangerous, and death-dealing attacks against Nemesis and his forces. The fate of a world hangs on their success.

In his series opener, King presents an unusual protagonist, a military action hero/angelic warrior with a smart strategic mind whose chief influences are theology, philosophy, magic, particle physics, and pop culture. As Micah describes himself, “I’m Daniel Craig’s James Bond, David Boreanaz’s Angel, and the young Gandalf.” He also has a serious substance abuse problem, consuming drug cocktails with ingredients like “meth, cocaine, MDMA, polysilocibin, endorphins, adrenalin, serotonin, and cortisol,” but luckily, technology can remove his physical addictions. Another important layer to his character is the recurring ethical problem of serving God while dealing death, but this complexity can seem less like a real dilemma and more like wanting to have it both ways, claiming moral seriousness while lingering on violent, occasionally salacious scenarios: “Naked women and girls were hanging from cages...It was a strip-club in excess.” Sometimes, Micah seems more a power fantasy than a character. That aside, the book’s fight scenes are numerous, exciting, action-packed, and well described. Fans of military paraphernalia will salivate at the paragraphs-long descriptions of Micah’s personal battle armory. A partial list of gear for one mission includes “left arm pit, MP5KS, right armpit, ten mags of ammo, all subsonic but incendiary….in the left fore pocket a SPASI-18 shotgun pistol, left hip rear, .500 Smith and Wesson revolver, right hip, .50 Desert Eagle, and right fore pocket, M93 with silencer” along with a variety of magical equipment and much, much more.

Overly obvious wish fulfillment, but a feast for lovers of SF/fantasy spiritual warfare.