Drawing Dead

Lizzy Ballard has spent her life folding the hands she can't win-but to save the one person she can't lose, she'll have to stay in a game she may have no way of winning.

Two weeks ago, Lizzy Ballard made it out of a compound in the Maryland woods. The makeshift family she'd risked everything to protect is together again-all except her mentor, Philip Castillo. He vanished into the orbit of Billy Chapel, the Baltimore crime boss whose rivals have a way of turning up dead, and the silence since has curdled into a fear Lizzy can't shake: that Philip is dead, or worse, that he was never the man she believed him to be.

Holed up under a fake ID, scraping by at the poker tables on an edge none of the other players suspects, Lizzy can't just lay low while Philip's circumstances remain a mystery. But Chapel isn't the only predator circling. Louise Mortensen-the scientist who made Lizzy what she is-has surfaced again with plans of her own, and Chapel and Mortensen are on a collision course that runs straight through Lizzy. The answers Lizzy needs are buried behind guarded gates and watchful cameras, protected by people who would kill her for asking the questions. And the closer she gets to the truth about Philip, the more she has to wonder whether saving him means crossing a line she can't uncross.

Matty Dalrymple's fifth Lizzy Ballard thriller is a taut, nerve-stretched story of devotion, doubt, and how far a person will go for the people who've become family. For readers of Stephen King's Firestarter who like a coldly calculating villain-or two-Drawing Dead deals Lizzy a hand she can't fold and may not survive, where the only way to win is to stop playing by everyone else's rules.