Another Coop Heist Books in Order

The Another Coop Heist books follow Coop, a thief whose specialty is stealing magical objects. Coop is not a chosen one or an arcane mastermind. His one real advantage is that he is strangely resistant to magic, which makes him useful to anyone who wants dangerous relics taken from very secure places.

In The Everything Box, Coop is just out of a special prison for supernatural offenders and already lining up his next job. An angel once misplaced a small box designed to wipe out humanity, and millennia later that very same object surfaces in modern Los Angeles. Coop is hired to steal it before anyone else can. Soon he is caught between a doomsday cult, a government agency called the Department of Peculiar Science, and various angels and demons who have very different opinions about whether the world should end.

The Wrong Dead Guy finds Coop still stuck working for the Department of Peculiar Science, which expects him to steal on their behalf instead of on his own. A supposedly harmless job involving an ancient mummy goes sideways when the corpse does not stay dead. Instead it breaks free in a research lab and starts reclaiming power, leaving Coop and his colleagues to clean up a mess involving curses, stolen bodies, and a lot of angry bureaucrats.

Compared with the Sandman Slim novels, the Coop stories are lighter and more openly comic. They still have monsters, angels, artifacts, and the occasional apocalypse, but the tone is closer to a crime caper where everything that can go wrong inevitably does. Kadrey riffs on heist movie staples, from double crosses to incompetent henchmen, while throwing in talking artifacts and time displaced weirdos.

Underneath the jokes, the series is also about working stiffs in a world where the truly powerful never seem to pay for their mistakes. Coop and his friends are constantly patching up other people’s messes, dodging both celestial management and human bosses who see them as expendable. That gives the books some bite without slowing down the slapstick.

If you like the idea of a supernatural heist series with an overworked, under appreciated thief at the center, start with The Everything Box. It sets up Coop’s world, introduces the Department of Peculiar Science, and lays the groundwork for the even stranger job that follows in The Wrong Dead Guy.