The Neon Boneyard

Eight books into the Daniel Faust series, Craig Schaefer delivers a story that feels like a reckoning. Las Vegas sorcerer and reluctant mob boss Faust has built something rare in his world — power, loyalty, a life he might almost call stable — and now it's all in the crosshairs at once. Old enemies, buried secrets, and the complicated wreckage of a family he walked away from converge at the worst possible moment, while he simultaneously holds territory in both the mortal underworld and the courts of Hell. The stakes here aren't abstract; they're personal, and that cuts far deeper.

What distinguishes Schaefer's craft throughout this series reaches a sharper edge here. His Las Vegas pulses with neon menace and mythological weight without ever feeling self-consciously "dark," and he builds plot pressure the way a good card dealer works — smooth, controlled, then suddenly showing you a hand you didn't see coming. The dialogue snaps, the pacing never sags, and Faust himself remains one of urban fantasy's most genuinely complicated protagonists: morally compromised, fiercely loyal, and always more vulnerable than he'd ever admit.