Paladin's Hope

Piper is a lich-doctor: a physician who works among the city's dead, determining cause of death for the guard's investigations. It's a peaceful, solitary job until he's called to the river to examine the latest in a series of bodies mangled by something no one can explain. Galen is a paladin of a dead god, holy and half-broken, who stopped believing love was for him a long time ago. Together with a level-headed gnole constable, the two men are pulled into the hunt for a killer moving through the city's underworld — and it falls to Galen to keep Piper alive while they close in.

Paladin's Hope is the third book in T. Kingfisher's Saint of Steel series, set in the same world as Paladin's Grace and Swordheart. It pairs a murder-mystery plot with a character-driven, queer (M/M) romance between two men each convinced they're past saving. The tone runs dark — bodies, blood, and a genuinely unsettling killer — alongside warmth and dry humor, with explicit content that marks it as adult reading.