IT’S 2066. AND YOU CAN'T TRUST ANYBODY… "Fast-paced action and a decisive, strong-minded heroine make this a good choice for fans of the postapocalyptic thrillers." --Library JournalFans of Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games will love Rica Marin, a new kickass, gunslinging heroine.Rica Marin’s a mercenary—a hired gun, soldier, and spy who answers only to whoever can keep her in the meds she and her only living relative need to survive the plagues that scourge the earth after biological warfare’s wiped out pretty much everything.It’s a strange world that’s left—composed of tiny city-states like Redwood, Sierra, and Rocky—run with a variety of futuristic machines and broken-down ones. Fancy new cars float as well as roll, but the Internet’s now so glitchy you can't even blog properly—newspapers have come back! So many machines are in disrepair that a fixer in this world isn't someone who rigs elections or cleans up after murders—it’s a person who can repair both an elevator and an ancient toilet. But roving bands of bandits, godders, causies, breeders, khakis, and toxies threaten to destroy what’s just been fixed.Anywhere there are people—however few—there’ll be power plays, and Rica’s current job at the Blackjack Casino is to run interference between the warring clans of Tahoe, in tiny Sierra. But then the city-state of Rocky gets ambitious. And that means war." ...truly one of those books that the reader simply cannot set aside until completion. A story whose pace is akin to the speed of a rocket-launcher missile, Blackjack will grasp any reader by the throat and hang on till the end. What characters! What plotting! ... (Torch Song) will linger in the mind for long after the completion, with the question ringing: Could a near-future like this actually occur?" —Euro-ReviewsWHO WILL LIKE IT: Fans of THE HUNGER GAMES Trilogy, The Millennium Trilogy, and post-apocalyptic thrillers and dystopian fiction. Think LEGEND for adults, or a literary expansion of THE BOOK OF ELI."Shelley Singer does an excellent job of describing a bleak future of the US.... Shelley’s world is dark and gritty with complex characters and an intriguing theme." -- Night Owl Reviews
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