Overview

Since she was six years old, Devin Perridin has been locked behind the walls of the family home to keep her hidden from those who would kill her. But at sixteen, she is exposed as a ""Syke,"" one of an outlawed minority who possess extraordinary powers of mind over matter. Snatched from hiding, she escapes the firing squad, but only to be imprisoned in a house of horrors: the Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of Persistent Mental Disorders. After an unknown time of torture and ""behavior modification,"" brutally designed to destroy her psychokinetic reflexes, she emerges from the asylum severely damaged in mind and spirit. Her salvation may lie in the series of crimes triggered by her release: first kidnapping, then attempted murder, and then a mustering of forbidden forces to assault the remote pseudo-psychiatric facility where she had been tortured into near-mindlessness. Drawing upon a strength she had always known was hers but had never before been able to consciously control, Devin defies the authoritarian society with its unjust laws that demand her death. She pushes through pain, isolation, and moral quandaries to seek justice for not only herself, but all members of a maligned and cruelly persecuted minority. A post-apocalyptic, paranormal allegory for the times in which we live.

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9781737717393

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Reviews

""Thematically rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast."" -The Black List ""This novel is immediately immersive, with an opening scene that sucks readers in with vivid sensory detail and a great sense of suspense."" -The Black List

Author Information

Deborah J. Lightfoot, a native of West Texas, got her love of history from her grandfather, a High Plains cowboy. From her mother, an artist and avid reader, came her love of books and all things mysterious and magical. Dark horsemen entered her imagination through such early influences as the television show ""Have Gun Will Travel,"" in which Richard Boone's Paladin was ""a knight without armor in a savage land."" Small matter that the sophisticated Paladin wielded a six-shooter instead of a sword. Six-shooters figure in Lightfoot's award-winning books of Western history and biography, The LH7 Ranch and Trail Fever. Swords and sorcery provide the action in her epic fantasy series Waterspell, a six-book saga with medieval overtones and historical background. Adverse Reactions, a Western/paranormal/fantasy blend, brings together her various interests in a cross-genre work of speculative historical fiction. With a journalism degree summa cum laude from Texas A&M University, Lightfoot has worked on both sides of the editorial desk for periodical and book publishers. She has taught creative writing at the college level and won numerous writing awards.

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