When the stakes are your soul, every hand is a gamble.
Lilah thought poker was her way through college—until one game destroyed everything. Desperate, she struck a bargain with a demon. Now her grandfather’s birthday gift, a deck of cards, is bound to her blood. Every hand she plays carries power she can barely control.
Her only guide is Hoyle’s Guide to Poker and Parlor Tricks, a battered rulebook she’s twisted into a personal grimoire. With every shuffle, she taps deeper into the deck’s secrets—but the more she plays, the closer she draws to the voice in the dark that owns her debt.
Across the city, two detectives are tracking a string of bizarre crimes that keep escalating—clues pointing to a single suspect, though none of it seems like coincidence.
Caught between the demon’s whispers and the law closing in, Lilah faces the ultimate gamble: walk away before she loses her humanity, or keep playing a game where every card could be her undoing.
Robert J. S. T. McCartney loves to write about the strange and bizarre. Lilah's Guide to Hoyle was written in collaboration with his best friend Albert Debusschere III.He currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his wife and kids.You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and abnormalpublishing.com.