"Amy was in tears now, shaking and distraught. Anne's adorable little head had popped over the side of the pit in dismay, doing its best impression of one of those baroque cherubs except with the weight of an equally baroque fate upon it. Kent's brows were in the ionosphere and me, well. For a minute, for longer, I thought I had completely lost it, for the body we had just uncovered bore utterly no resemblance to my perfectly lovely late sister, no resemblance at all." (from Her Ownmost Lives, QH2)

With the narrative taken over by Gwynne's bereaved younger sister - the acerbic Melissa, who is also, unbeknownst to herself, Guinevere's legendary half-sister Gwendolyn - the four remaining young women must at once discover the meaning of their leader's testament, and avoid being discovered by the police while continuing their own life-and-death battle against those who, with Gwynne's apparent death, are now in the ascendant. With both family and school at critical risk, as well as their own sanity, they turn to not only the arts of war and magic, but also, and most importantly, to art itself, to measure their worthiness against the coming void.

"Book 2 of the dark urban fantasy trilogy Queen of Hearts is nothing less than heart-stopping in its action and heartfelt in its emotion. With a guttural intonation and journeys far beneath your usual adventure-tale gutters, the heroines seek to avenge their leader's demise while at the same time stop history from folding in on itself. Absolutely current in its themes, Her Ownmost Lives leaves us hanging off a cosmic-scale precipice by which only the intense gravity of the concluding volume could save us." - Avinash Pillay, COO, Insightful Ethics Communications, Ltd.