ALC Review: Hench #2

Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots

Read by Alexa McKenna

Publication Date: May 19, 2026

Summary from NetGalley:

The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.

But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she’ll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

ALC provided by HarperAudio via Netgalley for an honest review.

Confession:

I have read many books with redemption arc for the villains, but I think this might be my first in the corruption arc genre. This story is dark and Anna makes many unexpected choices that take her further down the road to being a villain.

Alexa McKenna once again does an excellent job with the narration of this story. You can hear the sorrow and desperation in the character’s voices which makes the story that much more heartbreaking. She does an excellent job with all of the other character’s voice, capturing them perfectly. I still find her voice for Leviathan creepy, but that was probably a good thing.

I still like Anna/Auditor, but I wasn’t a fan of a lot of her choices. Her relationship with Leviathan also was not a healthy one. Anna is beginning to lose herself in her role as the Auditor and is also finding herself more and more isolated from everyone. Some of this was by her choice, but much of it is because of Leviathan’s influence. The dynamic between these two drives much of the story, and their unhealthy relationship made me uncomfortable at times. Anna makes a choice towards the end of the story, that I wasn’t expecting at all, and showed just how far she has gone to the villainess side.

This book starts shortly after the events in the first book. All of Leviathan’s henches are trying to pick up the pieces that the destruction of SuperCollider left behind. Without their arch nemesis, many of the villains feel unmoored and unsure of what to do. Anna turns her sights onto the entity that produced the heros, The Draft. Both she and Leviathan are determined to bring that organization down. We learn a bit more about The Draft and some of it despicable policies. I especially enjoyed the addition of ‘Mom’, the head of human resources for The Draft. His character was an excellent and he will make a great adversary going forward.

If you enjoyed the first book, you will not be disappointed by its sequel. This is not the final book however, there should be at least one more. This one does end with a bit of a cliff hanger, but that just makes me more excited for the next book. If you like dark fantasy with some incredibly well written characters, this is a series you should give a chance.