Hench Books in Order

The Hench series looks at a world of superheroes from the least glamorous angle possible: the people who do the admin, research, cleanup, and low-level dangerous work for supervillains. It is superhero fiction with the spotlight turned away from capes and toward the people who are expected to be expendable.

The series begins with Hench, which follows Anna Tromedlov, a temp worker taking whatever jobs she can get, including office work for criminals. She is not looking for a grand cause. She needs a paycheck. But a promising assignment ends in disaster when a famous superhero leaves her badly injured, and Anna is soon out of both work and options.

That is where the spreadsheets come in.

Stuck at home and furious, Anna starts researching the human cost of superhero battles. She gathers stories and data about injuries, property damage, trauma, and the people caught in the wake of heroic action. Her work raises an awkward question: if heroes cause so much collateral harm, what exactly makes them the good guys? When her findings begin to spread, Anna attracts the attention of Leviathan, one of the world's most powerful villains.

The setting matters because it treats superpowers as a managed industry. Heroes have publicity, branding, corporate support, and carefully controlled stories about what they do. Villains have organizations of their own, along with staff, hierarchy, and plenty of workplace dysfunction. Walschots uses that setup to explore gig work, medical consequences, public relations, and the way institutions decide whose suffering counts.

In Villain / Right Hand, Anna has become the Auditor and serves as Leviathan's trusted second-in-command. Her larger target is the Draft, the organization that creates, trains, and manages the world's major superheroes. But the work is no longer simply about exposing bad press or winning an argument. Anna must contend with a powerful marketing opponent, shifting alliances, and an employer whose feelings are harder to manage than he would ever admit.

These books are darkly funny, angry, and fast-moving, but they do not treat violence as consequence-free spectacle. The tension comes from Anna's growing power, her complicated loyalty to the people around her, and the uneasy possibility that being right about the heroes does not automatically make her methods right. Start with Hench, then continue with Villain / Right Hand.