Songs of the Seraphim Books in Order

Songs of the Seraphim is a brief, intense series about a modern assassin given an unlikely second chance. Toby O'Dare, known in the underworld as Lucky the Fox, has spent years carrying out clean, anonymous kills for a faceless employer, drifting farther from the musical, devout boy he once hoped to be.

In Angel Time Toby is holed up at the Mission Inn, a historic hotel in California, preparing for another hit when he is visited by Malchiah, a seraph who has been watching him for years. Offered the possibility of redemption, Toby agrees to work for God instead of his old handler and is carried back to thirteenth century England. There he must pose as a Dominican cleric and help a Jewish family falsely accused of ritual murder as tensions mount around them.

Of Love and Evil finds Toby further along that path of atonement. Summoned once more by Malchiah, he is sent to Renaissance Rome to look into a poisoning and to calm a vengeful dybbuk, all while learning how the choices of his former life still echo in the present. The missions force him to reckon with guilt, loyalty, and the difference between justice and revenge.

Though there are angels and time travel, the mood is reflective rather than flashy. Rice uses Toby's journeys to explore questions about forgiveness, free will, religious violence, and what it might mean to truly change course after having done terrible things.

The books are short, tightly focused, and best read in order, since Toby's spiritual and emotional growth is the real through line from first page to last.

If you come to Rice for Gothic atmosphere, you will still find crumbling churches, candlelit rooms, and long nights of doubt here, but the monsters are human habits and systems, and the stakes are a single soul trying to step back into the light.