He can lift forty tons. He cannot move the law. Maximilian "Max" Vance is the Coalition's metahuman operative - the man they call when a train derails, when a building collapses, when ordinary strength runs out. For years he has operated within the rules: intervene, report, sign the form, go home. His wife Elena works in diplomatic circles. His brother Marcus is a federal agent. The world is orderly. Manageable.
Then Elena is found dead at a Maryland rest stop, shot once at the base of the skull by someone who knew exactly where to aim.
The investigation that follows pulls Max into the architecture of a larger crime: a staged Capitol bombing that killed 219 people, a corrupt president who signed his own country's disaster into law, and an industrial empire that sells governments the technology to neutralize beings like him. Behind it all, one name - carved so hard into Elena's notebook that the pen tore through the page.
Pendelton.
As Max climbs from a Detroit foundry to the Oval Office, he loses, one by one, everything that kept him human. The law he believed in. The Coalition that credentialed him. The brother who covered for him in parking lots at midnight. The father who publicly disavows him. And finally the wife herself, whose plans for him may have been more calculated than her love - and whose last unfinished sentence, pressed into the ghost of a torn page, asks the question he cannot stop carrying:
If Max finds out, he will...
Cold, precise, and morally unsparing, IMPERATOR: The Twilight of Law is the story of a man who protected democracy until the day he decided to replace it - and everything it cost him to get there.
Book 1 of the five-volume Imperator Saga.
For readers of dark superhero fiction, political conspiracy thrillers, and literary science fiction who want their genre with weight.
