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Pawns of Eternity
Not yet published
Expected 27 Nov 26What if your memories, your desires, even the person you believed yourself to be—were never entirely your own?
Ronald Milburn thought he was just a spirit.
For two centuries, he’s worked at the Afterlife Services Agency, helping the newly dead navigate what comes next while waiting for his own chance to reincarnate.
Then, one night, the woman Ron has spent far too long pretending he doesn’t want, disappears.
So begins a mystery, four hundred years in the making.
Ancient spirit files. Centuries of Ron’s records buried behind redactions.
Somewhere behind it all, the Afterlife is preparing for its largest software update, and Ronald Milburn may be more than another spirit caught in the system.
Dark, sensual, irreverently funny, and unexpectedly tender, PAWNS OF ETERNITY is a story of love, lust, loyalty, and free will—where even eternity may not be what it seems.
Ronald Milburn thought he was just a spirit.
For two centuries, he’s worked at the Afterlife Services Agency, helping the newly dead navigate what comes next while waiting for his own chance to reincarnate.
Then, one night, the woman Ron has spent far too long pretending he doesn’t want, disappears.
So begins a mystery, four hundred years in the making.
Ancient spirit files. Centuries of Ron’s records buried behind redactions.
Somewhere behind it all, the Afterlife is preparing for its largest software update, and Ronald Milburn may be more than another spirit caught in the system.
Dark, sensual, irreverently funny, and unexpectedly tender, PAWNS OF ETERNITY is a story of love, lust, loyalty, and free will—where even eternity may not be what it seems.
346 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication November 27, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from Author
Heaven Has an HR Department, a Soul Randomizer, and No One Knows Why
Pawns of Eternity, by N.R. Smith, isn't a typical read for me. However, I decided to give it a go because of what the story promised to contain: angels, demons, dark humor, and afterlife bureaucracy. It was enough to get me interested, but the way the elements were used, was not enough to keep me.
Ronald Milburn isn't an angel or a demon. He's an employee. He died at his desk in 1769 and has spent more than two centuries as an afterlife support agent, sitting in an eight-by-eight cubicle, scanning newly dead souls with a barcode gun and offering them three options for their next life. Everyone else moves on within ten years. Ron never does. He counts the 171 tiles from the front door to the elevator, straightens his stapler, and applies for every guardian angel posting on the bulletin board, knowing he'll never make the short list. Then Samira, the coworker in the next cubicle, the one with a soulmate and a rainbow of short skirts, asks him out for a drink. By the next morning, she's gone, and Ron can't let go of why.
The premise hooked me. I liked how the afterlife was painted, and the structure built to keep it running was interesting. Heaven runs like a mid-level corporation, complete with memos nobody reads, sensitivity training, security cameras, and an HR team that trades gossip by thought alone. An old man fresh off his deathbed asks if he's coming back as a duck. Promotion means picking from twenty angelic guises at a workstation nicknamed the Halo Hangar, then logging in to find your client list starts at five thousand souls. Ron's login screen comes up in cuneiform because his spirit is that old. Those details are clever, and they made me laugh.
It all fell apart for me at the conclusion. I felt cheated. The book never explains why its characters did what they did, or more specifically, what was so wrong with the way the afterlife already functioned. A whole system gets questioned, and I finished the last chapter without knowing why it needed questioning in the first place.
A contract also hangs over the last 10% of the story. It gets brought up again and again, yet the book never tells us what was signed or what anyone agreed to. A plot point with that much weight deserves more than a passing mention.
I understand why we get so little backstory for these characters. They aren't meant to know their own pasts. Ron has never read his own file, and when he asks his friends about their previous lives, the answer is that they don't matter now. As a choice, it makes sense. In practice, it made it hard for me, and I imagine other readers, to connect with anyone or form any kind of attachment. Ron's growth is mostly what happens to him, not what he chooses. He loosens up, stops lining up his pens, and finds friends for the first time in two hundred years, but his fixation on Samira drives nearly everything he does, and I never understood him well enough to root for him.
Parts of the book didn't make sense either. The story makes a point of how much Ron's promotion matters by the end, so what purpose did leaving him behind an ASA desk for two centuries serve? The book never says.
I also saw the big twist coming. Once a certain item surfaces partway through, it's easy to put together the reveal the ending is built around. I'm sure it's meant to land as a shock. It fell flat because I saw right through it.
I can't say I was drawn to any of the characters, but Brenda was by far the funniest, and likely one a lot of readers will relate to. She shows up to Ron's orientation as a seven-foot angel with a sultry female voice, tears his policy handbook in half, and tells him the one rule that matters on his first day: "Don't fucking freak out." She's crude, blunt, and the only one willing to tell Ron when he's wrong. Her scenes with Abby, her soulmate in HR, are where the humor works best. They fight like it's foreplay and make up just as fast.
This was labeled as a romantasy, and I'd have to wholly disagree. The relationship the story is built around spends most of the book apart, and it's mostly one-sided pining. Nearly all the heat comes from club hookups and casual encounters that don't build anything between the characters. There's plenty of sex and plenty of fantasy, but very little romance. It reads more like an afterlife workplace comedy with explicit scenes, and readers picking it up for a love story will likely feel misled.
There were multiple points where I considered DNFing this book. I regret that I didn't.
The author rates the spice level at:🌶️🌶️🌶️. Open door and frequent, including public and group scenes, but don't expect much heat. Nothing is truly descriptive. Most of it is vague description, allusion, and innuendo, and the scenes skip past the act almost as soon as they start. Compared to other spicy reads, I doubt any of it would make anyone blush.
Content Warnings: sexual content, dubious consent through supernatural influence, bondage and power play, memory manipulation, graphic battle violence, death, grief, miscarriage (mentioned), and heavy drinking.
Tropes: workplace romance, forbidden love, soulmates, reincarnation, pining, grumpy/sunshine, found family
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Pawns of Eternity, by N.R. Smith, isn't a typical read for me. However, I decided to give it a go because of what the story promised to contain: angels, demons, dark humor, and afterlife bureaucracy. It was enough to get me interested, but the way the elements were used, was not enough to keep me.
Ronald Milburn isn't an angel or a demon. He's an employee. He died at his desk in 1769 and has spent more than two centuries as an afterlife support agent, sitting in an eight-by-eight cubicle, scanning newly dead souls with a barcode gun and offering them three options for their next life. Everyone else moves on within ten years. Ron never does. He counts the 171 tiles from the front door to the elevator, straightens his stapler, and applies for every guardian angel posting on the bulletin board, knowing he'll never make the short list. Then Samira, the coworker in the next cubicle, the one with a soulmate and a rainbow of short skirts, asks him out for a drink. By the next morning, she's gone, and Ron can't let go of why.
The premise hooked me. I liked how the afterlife was painted, and the structure built to keep it running was interesting. Heaven runs like a mid-level corporation, complete with memos nobody reads, sensitivity training, security cameras, and an HR team that trades gossip by thought alone. An old man fresh off his deathbed asks if he's coming back as a duck. Promotion means picking from twenty angelic guises at a workstation nicknamed the Halo Hangar, then logging in to find your client list starts at five thousand souls. Ron's login screen comes up in cuneiform because his spirit is that old. Those details are clever, and they made me laugh.
It all fell apart for me at the conclusion. I felt cheated. The book never explains why its characters did what they did, or more specifically, what was so wrong with the way the afterlife already functioned. A whole system gets questioned, and I finished the last chapter without knowing why it needed questioning in the first place.
A contract also hangs over the last 10% of the story. It gets brought up again and again, yet the book never tells us what was signed or what anyone agreed to. A plot point with that much weight deserves more than a passing mention.
I understand why we get so little backstory for these characters. They aren't meant to know their own pasts. Ron has never read his own file, and when he asks his friends about their previous lives, the answer is that they don't matter now. As a choice, it makes sense. In practice, it made it hard for me, and I imagine other readers, to connect with anyone or form any kind of attachment. Ron's growth is mostly what happens to him, not what he chooses. He loosens up, stops lining up his pens, and finds friends for the first time in two hundred years, but his fixation on Samira drives nearly everything he does, and I never understood him well enough to root for him.
Parts of the book didn't make sense either. The story makes a point of how much Ron's promotion matters by the end, so what purpose did leaving him behind an ASA desk for two centuries serve? The book never says.
I also saw the big twist coming. Once a certain item surfaces partway through, it's easy to put together the reveal the ending is built around. I'm sure it's meant to land as a shock. It fell flat because I saw right through it.
I can't say I was drawn to any of the characters, but Brenda was by far the funniest, and likely one a lot of readers will relate to. She shows up to Ron's orientation as a seven-foot angel with a sultry female voice, tears his policy handbook in half, and tells him the one rule that matters on his first day: "Don't fucking freak out." She's crude, blunt, and the only one willing to tell Ron when he's wrong. Her scenes with Abby, her soulmate in HR, are where the humor works best. They fight like it's foreplay and make up just as fast.
This was labeled as a romantasy, and I'd have to wholly disagree. The relationship the story is built around spends most of the book apart, and it's mostly one-sided pining. Nearly all the heat comes from club hookups and casual encounters that don't build anything between the characters. There's plenty of sex and plenty of fantasy, but very little romance. It reads more like an afterlife workplace comedy with explicit scenes, and readers picking it up for a love story will likely feel misled.
There were multiple points where I considered DNFing this book. I regret that I didn't.
Verdict: A clever, foul-mouthed corporate Heaven and one scene-stealing angel can't save a twist you'll see coming and an ending that never explains itself.
The author rates the spice level at:🌶️🌶️🌶️. Open door and frequent, including public and group scenes, but don't expect much heat. Nothing is truly descriptive. Most of it is vague description, allusion, and innuendo, and the scenes skip past the act almost as soon as they start. Compared to other spicy reads, I doubt any of it would make anyone blush.
Content Warnings: sexual content, dubious consent through supernatural influence, bondage and power play, memory manipulation, graphic battle violence, death, grief, miscarriage (mentioned), and heavy drinking.
Tropes: workplace romance, forbidden love, soulmates, reincarnation, pining, grumpy/sunshine, found family
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review