Description

Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse

Hardcover – Saga Pr – Nov 2022 – 201 pages

High in the remote mountains, the town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity. Divinity is the remains of the body of the rebel Abaddon, who fell to Earth during Heaven’s War, and its powers the world’s most inventive and innovative technologies, ushering in a new age of progress. However, only the descendants of those who rebelled, called the Fallen, possess the ability to see the rich lodes of the precious element. That makes them a necessary evil among the good and rightous people called the Elect, and Goetia is a town segregated by ancestry and class.

Celeste and Mariel are two Fallen sisters, bound by blood but raised in separate worlds. Celeste grew up with her father, passing in priviledged Elect society, while Mariel stayed with their mother in the Fallen slums of Goetia. Upon her father’s death, Celeste returns to Goetia and reunites with Mariel. Mariel is a great beauty with an angelic voice, and Celeste, racked with guilt for having left her sister behind, becomes her fiercest protector.

When Mariel is accused of murdering a Virtue, a member of the powerful Order of the Archangels that rule Goetia, Celeste must take on the role of advocatus diaboli and defend her sister in the courts of the Virtue. Celeste, aided by her ex-lover, Abraxas, who was once one of the rebels’ great generals, sets out to prove Mariel’s innocence. But powerful forces among the Virtues and the Elect mining barons don’t want Celeste prying into their business, and Mariel has secrets of her own to protect…