If Chess navigating Downside’s gang politics with Bump and Slobag, juggling Church jobs and street-level hexes, hooked you, you’ll vibe with James Stark tearing through Los Angeles’s occult back alleys. Like Chess’s ward-work and sigils in that lethal airport haunting, Stark uses brutal, rule-bending sorcery while cutting deals with monsters and crime bosses. The voice is razor-edged, the city feels haunted in every alley, and the violence hits as hard as a miscast banishment.

You followed Chess—drug habit, Church paycheck, and all—into a job that should’ve been simple and spiraled into blood magic and body counts, and still rooted for her. In Blackbirds, Miriam Black is no saint either: she sees how people die and lives by grifts and bad bargains until one vision forces her to decide what she’ll do to change the inevitable. If you liked caring about Chess even as she made messy, dangerous choices with Terrible at her side, Miriam’s scorched-earth honesty and desperate gambits will hit the same nerve.

Chess’s debunking gig for the Church—only to end up knee-deep in a lethal haunting and leaning on street connections like Terrible—mirrors Felix Castor’s world. Castor takes a “simple” job to lay a ghost at a London archive and finds mobsters, a succubus with her own agenda, and a case that won’t stay clean. If the way Chess’s airport exorcism led to occult conspiracies and criminal pressure grabbed you, Castor’s methodical sleuthing, improvised rites, and brushes with very human threats will scratch the same itch.

If you liked how Chess pieced together sigils, testimonies, and grim crime scenes to trace the force behind that murderous haunting, meet PC Peter Grant. After a witness gives him a statement from beyond the grave, Peter apprentices to Inspector Nightingale and hunts a violent spirit hijacking Londoners—think the way Chess’s case snowballed from one ghost to a citywide threat. You’ll get clever magical forensics, turf tensions with powers you shouldn’t cross, and a case that turns neighborhoods into battlegrounds.

Part of Unholy Ghosts’ pull is living inside Chess’s head—her cravings, catastrophes, and hard-won focus as she works a case that could break her. In Borderline, Millie Roper’s voice is just as candid and unflinching: she’s managing BPD and a life-changing injury when a secret organization drafts her to police traffic between Hollywood and the fae. Like Chess balancing Church doctrine with Downside realities, Millie navigates rules, manipulation, and her own triggers while solving a disappearance that peels back dangerous glamour.