Where does an angel go when he's been to Hell and back? Renegade angel Bobby Dollar does not have an easy afterlife. After surviving the myriad gruesome dangers Hell oh-so-kindly offered him, Bobby has returned empty-handed – his demon girlfriend Casmira, the Countess of Cold Hands, is still in the clutches of Eligor, Grand Duke of Hell. Some hell of a rescue. Forced to admit his failure, Bobby ends up back at his job as an angel advocate. That is, until Walter, an old angel friend whom Bobby never thought he’d see again, shows up at the local bar. The last time he saw Walter was in Hell, when Walter had tried to warn him about one of Bobby’s angel superiors. But now Walter can’t remember anything, and Bobby doesn’t know whom to trust. Turns out that there's corruption hidden within the higher ranks of Heaven and Hell, but the only proof Bobby has is a single feather. Before he knows it, he’s in the High Hall of Heavenly Judgement – no longer a bastion for the moral high ground, if it ever was, but instead just another rigged system – on trial for his immortal soul... Sleeping Late on Judgement Day is the third installment of Tad Williams' urban fantasy Bobby Dollar series! Praise for the Bobby Dollar series: " Delicious, crunchy, Hellish fun .... Bobby’s odyssey makes for a compelling, page-turning experience, chock-full of visceral sights and sensory overload." —Tor.com “A noir fantasy series with a dark and thrilling story of Heaven and Hell battling for human souls. Exhilarating action, fascinating characters, and high stakes will leave the reader both satisfied and eager for the next installment.” — Publisher's Weekly “When I heard that Tad Williams was writing an urban fantasy novel, I got all tingly. Now I’ve read it, and it’s even better than I’d dared to hope . It’s snarky, fast-paced, and above all, original. You should be tingly, too.” —Patrick Rothfuss, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Wise Man's Fear "Fans of hard-living angel Bobby Dollar will no doubt mourn the end of this outlandishly imaginative series, but not before they savor another unpredictable and enjoyable adventure from Heaven’s most unconventional angel ." — RT Reviews Tad Williams  is a California-based fantasy superstar.  His genre-creating (and genre-busting) books have sold tens of millions worldwide.  His considerable output of epic fantasy and epic science fiction series, fantastical stories of all kinds, urban fantasy novels, comics, scripts, etc., have strongly influenced a generation of writers.  Tad always has several secret projects on the go. 2016 will see the debut of a number of them; March 2017 brings  The Witchwood Crown , the first volume in the long-awaited return to the world of the Memory, Sorrow & Thorn novels. Tad and his family live in the Santa Cruz mountains in a suitably strange and beautiful house. DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES —MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A. contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS prologue I HADN’T ATTENDED a trial in Heaven before—not in person. They don’t happen that often, for one thing. But wait, O wise angel , I hear you say. How can there be trials in Heaven? Which is a perfectly good question, because once you’ve made it to the Big Happy you should be golden, right? You’ve been judged righteous or you wouldn’t get in, and after that you’re doing the work of the Highest, so how could you go wrong? Well, first of all, there’s the whole Free Will thing—people and angels have to be free to make mistakes, or else we live in a clockwork universe where everything’s predetermined and perfect. Most of the time Heaven does seem like that, a flock of serene shiny creatures living in complete harmony, a hive of buzzing happiness and shared purpose. But we all know that in nature, no matter how well any system works, there’s always a couple of dumbass birds heading north for the winter when everyone else is flying south, or one dipshit salmon belly-surfing down the rapids, yelling, “Whoo, yeah! Check me out!” as he smacks face first into the more sensible fish swimming upstream to spawn. The fact that these unrepresentative idiots freeze and plummet from the sky or die without issue isn’t the point—the point is Free Will, and apparently we angels are capable of poor impulse control just like everybody else. Thus, there are trials in Heaven, and I was about to attend my first. Although “attend” is a bit misleading, I admit. It wasn’t really my first, because I’d been aware of several other trials. Here in the Happy Place you can know about important things like that and even follow them closely without actually being present, although it’s hard to explain, because—duh—it’s another Heaven thing. Imagine sitting in a crowded bar when the playoffs are on and a local team is involved: you don’t have to stay glued to the screen to know what’s going on in the game; you can pick up what’s happening in a dozen different ways. And that’s how I’d