If you loved how Caine slices through Overworld’s noble houses and makes monstrous choices to save Shanna—even when it stains his soul—Monza Murcatto’s revenge spree in Best Served Cold will hit the same nerve. After the Grand Duke Orso has her betrayed and left for dead, Monza assembles a lethal crew (Morveer, Shivers, Friendly, and more) to methodically take apart her enemies. Like Caine’s brutal dance with Ma’elKoth in Ankhana, the book thrives on razor-edged pragmatism, dark humor, and consequences you can taste in the blood and ash.

Caine’s career as an Actor is bathed in blood and hard truths—the kind you see up close when the broadcast lights go off. The Steel Remains matches that ferocity: Ringil Eskiath carves his way through slavers and demons with a cynicism born of ugly wars, while Archeth and Egar reckon with the wreckage left by empires. If Ma’elKoth’s godlike menace and the carnage in Ankhana stuck with you, Morgan’s blade-on-bone fights, scorched morality, and bitter victories will feel like coming home to the same storm.

On Earth, Caine’s murders are content—packaged, sold, and rated. That exploitation echoes in Altered Carbon, where Takeshi Kovacs is sleeved and resleeved at the whim of the ultra-rich to solve Laurens Bancroft’s ‘suicide.’ The tech is different, but the rot is familiar: bodies are assets, pain is a product, and people like Ortega get crushed between power and spectacle. If the Audience back home cheering Caine’s kills and the Studio’s leash on him chilled you, Kovacs’s neon-noir gauntlet will scratch that same itch.

Caine’s jumps to Overworld turn him into a stranger with a target on his back; every crossing escalates the stakes. In The Drawing of the Three, Roland of Gilead drags allies through impossible doors—Eddie Dean from a 1980s drug war, Odetta/Detta from civil-rights-era New York, Jack Mort from a nightmare—to wage a brutal, multi-world fight. If the culture clash and deadly politics of Ankhana gripped you, Roland’s doorways and the violent collisions that follow will deliver that same dangerous, dislocating rush.

Behind Caine’s duels and rescues is a chessboard of nobles, guilds, and overlords—think of the maneuvering around Ma’elKoth and the way one deal in Ankhana can doom a city. The Traitor Baru Cormorant turns that scheming into the whole blade. Baru infiltrates the Masquerade’s bureaucracy, mastering coin and policy to topple colonizers from within. If you relished how every alliance in Heroes Die cut both ways, Baru’s ledger-driven betrayals and empire-scale gambits will leave you breathless.