The Locust Job

By the ninth book in the Daniel Faust series, Craig Schaefer has built something genuinely rare: a Las Vegas underworld where mob politics, black magic, and mythology coil together into a world that feels earned rather than assembled. The Locust Job raises the stakes to something ancient and personal — Daniel is trapped in a narrative older than history, forced to outmaneuver a curse baked into the fabric of reality itself. The threat is existential, but the emotional core is immediate: a man fighting to write his own ending when the universe has already decided how his story goes.

What rewards returning readers here is how Schaefer handles the long game. Years of character work pay off in ways that feel inevitable rather than convenient, and his prose stays lean and propulsive without sacrificing atmosphere. The mystery threading through 1940s occult history gives the book a second layer that slows down just enough to breathe before accelerating back into the present danger. Schaefer trusts his readers to keep up, and that trust — rare in genre fiction — is exactly what makes this series worth following this deep.