Scare Card

When Lizzy Ballard's enemies play their cruelest card, can she outsmart them before her life and the lives of those she loves are dealt a fatal blow?

For years, Lizzy Ballard has been running: from the fertility-clinic experiment that made her what she is, from the trail of bodies her power has left in its wake, and from Louise Mortensen, the brilliant, glacial scientist who engineered her. Now Lizzy is hiding out under a fake ID, bankrolling the handful of people she loves one rigged poker hand at a time, and letting herself believe she's learned to control the lethal gift she was born with.

Then Louise takes someone Lizzy can't afford to lose, and the terms are simple. Come to a fortress buried deep in the Maryland woods. Bring the one man who has kept her alive. But what waits behind those mirrored windows is even more dangerous than Louise: a thug who hides his violence behind easy charm, and a plan that means to turn Lizzy from hostage into weapon. The grounds are walled and guarded, the phones are silenced, and every person who loves her is now a chip someone else is holding.

Matty Dalrymple's fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller is a taut story of loyalty, complicity, and the brutal math of love that asks one unbearable question: how much of what Lizzy does is choice, and how much was decided for her before she could speak? For readers of Stephen King's Firestarter who like a cold, calculating villain at the center, Scare Card deals Lizzy into a game where the people she loves are the stakes-and she's about to learn what it costs to be holding the deadliest hand at the table.