Patricia Ward – författare

For fans of White Smoke, The Hazel Wood, and Wilder Girls comes an original, hypnotizing horror thriller in the vein ofMidsommar,as one girl inherits a mysterious house from her estranged grandmother—and a letter with sinister instructions.

Jo never expected to be placed in her absent grandmother’s will—let alone be left her house, her land, and a letter with mysterious demands.

Upon arriving at the inherited property, things are even more strange.

The tenants mentioned in the letter are odd, just slightly…off. Jo feels something dark and decrepit in the old shack behind the house. And the things that her father used to talk about, his delusions… Why is Jo starting to believe they might be real?

But what Jo fears most is the letter from her grandmother. Because if it’s true, then Jo belongs here, in this strange place. And she has no choice but to stay.

All around us, under most of humanity''s very noses, lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered allows them to indulge their wildest and often violent urges. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs.Servs are aliens themselves, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, they are destined to live in pain, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them that burns like a white-hot fire under the stress of their servitude.Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and by chance was adopted by humans. She''s an outcast among outcasts, dwelling in both worlds but belonging to neither. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she desperately longs to maintain, her 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, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she''ll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she''s made for herself. Skinner Luce is Lucy''s story.