HELL TO PAY

A con artist summons her old crew for their trickiest heist yet: stealing her brother’s soul back from hell.

Elysia “Elle” Fields lives in a world where it’s possible to visit the Afterlife and return with magic to the land of the living. One thing it’s not possible to retrieve, however, is a dead person’s soul. When Elle is approached by Rook Crawford, who wants her to resurrect his sister, she finds the perfect excuse to covertly continue her quest to bring her deceased brother, Dante, back. To accomplish this, Elle, who reads white, reconstructs her team, who scattered after Dante’s death—runic witch Poppy Champagne, who’s Black; nonbinary “designated muscle-slash-wheelman” CJ, who presents white; and alchemist Tolliver Takao, who’s cued Japanese American—plus the New Guy, Argentinian pickpocket Ezra Cardoso, who’s cued as a Sephardic Jew. Their mission is to steal and translate the Voynich manuscript, a codex written in a language no one’s been able to crack, before taking a soul from Tartarus (“the lowest level of the Afterlife”) and dodging mafialike syndicates that have become too interested in their activities, while ensuring they aren’t being conned themselves. Elle is a darkly funny narrator who’s comfortable in the morally gray areas she inhabits. The worldbuilding is original and revealed naturally through exposition as it becomes relevant to the cons Elle and her crew run.

Ambitious and refreshing; readers will want to settle in for the long con.