Lisa Brackmann

Emily runs a successful bistro in Humboldt County, California, where she lives with her handsome boyfriend, Jeff, a volunteer firefighter. A lot of her best customers are in the cannabis business, but so what? It's true that the bistro was funded by drug money, and sure, firefighting isn’t really Jeff’s main job—that would be flying Humboldt's finest weed to out-of-state customers. And sure, he isn’t really Emily’s boyfriend, more like the guy she’s stuck with by circumstance. Actually, his name isn’t Jeff, it’s Danny; and Emily’s real name is Michelle Mason, although no one can ever know that. She’s on the run from her past—which has just caught up with her in its ugliest form: Gary, an ex-CIA and black ops agent who got her and Danny into this whole mess, and who Michelle should have killed when she had the chance.  When Gary shows up at Michelle’s restaurant the same night Danny is arrested by the DEA during what should have been a routine flight, Michelle knows they’ve been set up. Danny’s life is on the line: he’s dangling bait in a maximum-security Houston jail, prey to Gary and whatever shadowy powers Gary works for. Gary will help Michelle out—get Danny out of this jam—if she’ll just do him one little favor: take a job in Houston working for the figurehead of a multimillion-dollar anti-crime nonprofit. But Michelle knows whatever she’s getting into isn’t what it seems. All she can do is hope she figures out what Gary's real endgame is before she--or someone close to her--pays the ultimate price.Lisa Brackmann has written a chilling and thought-provoking thriller that reveals the unsavory link between marijuana legalization and the big-money politics of the United States’ private prison industry.From the Hardcover edition.

American Ellie Cooper, deserted by her husband, has made a number of friends in China. But suddenly one of them disappears, and security organizations are hounding her for information. Contacted through an online role-playing game by a group claiming to be friends of Lao Zhang asking her for help, Ellie does the only thing she can - keep on playing. Iraq vet Ellie Cooper is down and out in China, trying to lose herself in the alien worlds of performance artists and online gamers. When a chance encounter with a Muslim fugitive drops her down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, Ellie must decide who to trust among the artists, dealers, collectors and operatives claiming to be on her side – in particular, a mysterious organization operating within a popular online game.