Dead Man's Hand

Theo Marsh wrote three doors into the rules of the world. Sixty miles down the Ohio River, someone wrote a fourth.In Wheeling, West Virginia, nobody has to say goodbye anymore. When someone dies, they get back up. The mailman walks his route. The baker holds out her tray. Mothers serve breakfast to their dead husbands, and the whole town calls it a miracle. The man who made it happen is Wade Lusk, a gentle third-generation undertaker who has buried everyone in town for forty-one years. He's a Wild Card, like Theo. His rule is The Fourth Door: Back. Then Cassie Okafor's paper crane comes home scorched, carrying four words: "He's still IN there." The dead of Wheeling are awake inside their bodies. They can hear everything. They cannot stop. And the only man who can let them go can't hear a single one of them. Now Theo has to go down the river with a healer, a fire duelist, a gravedigger from another world, an old man riding a Mire Titan, and the empty chair where his boxer used to sit. To free a town that doesn't want to be freed, he'll have to sit down at a card table and stake the one thing he's never risked. His own death. Inside you'll find: A villain who isn't evil, just grief with a license A five-card-draw showdown where every card is a person, and the dead can choose to stand up A lockkeeper, a gravedigger, and a river of new Wild Cards, some of them kind Ruth Abernathy, given one hour to dance The most hopeful (and most heartbreaking) book in the series Book Four of The Last Draw. Start with Gravedrafter.