Jake Hatcher is a combat veteran who's been trained to extract information by any means necessary — and is serving a military prison sentence for it. After he's granted an unexpected release to attend the funeral of a brother he never knew, Hatcher becomes drawn into a mystery connected to the alluring woman his brother apparently died saving. Before long, Hatcher realizes the police are hiding information and covering up what really happened, and he is determined to find out why.
At the same time, an enigmatic plutocrat named Demetrius Valentine is murdering young women in Manhattan in grisly fashion. Seemingly untouchable and assisted by a sociopathic hulk of a man, Valentine proceeds with a plot few beyond what most could imagine.
Hatcher's digging soon uncovers a hidden community few among the living know exist, one populated by irresistibly beautiful women whose motives and intentions are difficult to discern, inhuman females known as Carnates. Facing inscrutable adversaries and uncertain alliances, Hatcher becomes an unwitting component of Valentine's plan, a plan intended to channel the one being that can end the reign of Heaven, a plan to undo the very concept of salvation itself.
But Valentine may have underestimated his foe, for Jake Hatcher is no ordinary man. He's a man who's been damned in almost every conceivable way; by his government, by his past, by the police. A man who's left part of his soul in battle, and part on the blood-stained floors of third-world interrogation rooms — a man with nothing left to lose. Nothing, that is, but the souls of everyone else, everywhere...
