A Crooked Mark
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"A dark, twisting coming-of-age sure to leave readers glancing over their shoulder for the Devil. Kao perfectly illustrates the struggles of choosing your own path through a lens of fire and knives, and you won't want to put it down." —Andrew Joseph White, New York Times bestselling author of Hell Followed With Us
A dark and sinister debut YA novel about a teen boy who must hunt down those marked by the devil - including the girl he has fallen for.
Perfect for fans of Neal Shusterman and Kendare Blake.
Rae Winter should be dead.
Some say that walking away from the car crash that killed her dad is a miracle, but seventeen-year-old Matthew Watts knows that the forces of Good aren’t the only ones at work. The devil, Lucifer himself, can mark a soul about to pass on, sending it back to the land of the living to carry out his evil will.
Matt has grown up skipping from town to town alongside his father hunting anyone who has this mark. They have one purpose: Find these people, and exterminate them.
After helping his father for years, Matt takes on his own mission: Rae Winter, miracle survivor. But when Matt starts to fall for Rae, to make friends for the first time in his life, he’s not sure who or what to believe anymore. How can someone like Rae, someone who is thoughtful and smart and kind, be an agent of the devil? With the lines of reality and fantasy, myth and paranoia blurred, Matt confronts an awful truth....
What if the devil’s mark doesn’t exist?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kao deftly blends chilling, slow-burn psychological horror with supernatural elements and moving relationships in this intense debut. Seventeen-year-old Matt Watts works with his father as members of Second Sweep, a covert organization dedicated to identifying and executing people marked by Lucifer. The Marked, those who have escaped certain death, are considered very dangerous, especially because of their rapidly developing abilities that allow them to psychically manipulate their surroundings. Matt's first solo mission is to befriend and, if necessary, execute 16-year-old Rae Winter, the sole survivor of a multi-fatality car accident. Matt inserts himself into Rae's mundane life, moving to the charming suburb of Mills Creek and enrolling in school for the first time after being homeschooled by his father. But as the two teens grow closer, Matt struggles to reconcile kind and beautiful Rae with the treacherous Marked he's been forced to annihilate and confront horrifying truths about his profession. Through Matt's snarky first-person narration, Kao weaves a captivating tale laced with aptly fatalistic humor that closely examines the unraveling of one teen's entire worldview and the overwhelming stress of living a double life. Matt is half Chinese, half white; Rae has light brown hair and hazel eyes. Ages 14–up.