Skinner Luce
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Skinner was what servs called each other. It was because they were fake, their skins a disguise…”
Every year when the deep cold of winter sets in, unbeknownst to humanity, dangerous visitors arrive from another world. Disguised as humans, the Nafikh move among us in secret, hungry for tastes of this existence. Their fickle, often-violent needs must be accommodated at all times, and the price of keeping them satisfied is paid most heavily by servs.
Created by the Nafikh to attend their every whim, servs are physically indistinguishable from humans but for the Source, the painful, white-hot energy that both animates and enslaves them. Destined to live in pain, unable to escape their bondage, servs dwell in a bleak underworld where life is brutal and short.
Lucy is a serv who arrived as a baby and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, struggling to find a place where she truly belongs. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary life she desperately longs to maintain; her human family unaware of her darkest secrets.
But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, turned upon by the servs who once held her dear, she must protect her family and the life she’s made for herself.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lucy Hennessey grew up thinking she was a normal human being. She learned the hard way that she is a serv, created by the Nafikh, an alien race, to serve them in any capacity whenever they visit Earth. If she lives long enough to meet her service quota, she can be freed; having experienced a normal life, she now sometimes dares to dream what she might do with that freedom. But everything begins to fall apart, and her grim serv world crashes against that of her human family's when she is linked to the death of a child serv and encounters a tenacious human wielding an uncanny knowledge of the Nafikh (who are otherwise a well-kept secret). Running away is useless, and it seems that the only way for Lucy to save herself and her family is to plunge deeper into the Nafikh's world. Ward (The Bullet Collection) delivers a gut-punching novel, consistently taut and bleak. Readers will feel Lucy hanging on by her fingernails just beneath the human world and bloodied by every hard climb upward as she tries straddling two lives while fitting into neither.