MAURA

She spent her life saving people. Death has made her a danger to them.

Five years after the outbreak destroyed the world she knew, Maura Grinstead is still doing what she has always done: keeping people alive.

At Trestle Ward, a fortified settlement in the ruins of Buffalo, medical supplies are running out, the fences are under constant threat, and every patient presents another impossible choice.

Then Maura is bitten.

Following the settlement's own infection protocols, she is locked outside its walls to die.

But when death comes, her story doesn't end.

Maura awakens in a decaying body with no heartbeat, an overwhelming hunger for living flesh—and, impossibly, enough awareness to remember who she was.

For a while.

She soon discovers a horrifying truth. Feeding can restore the clarity slipping from her mind. Animal remains offer brief relief. Human flesh brings something far more powerful: the ability to think, remember and make decisions.

When Maura encounters other conscious undead, she discovers Wickline, a settlement where a calculating leader named Silas Malkin controls the food supply and the minds of those who depend upon it.

Here, hunger is more than suffering.

It is a means of control.

As Maura forms an uneasy alliance with a fellow survivor named Rhea, she begins questioning whether the undead must survive by hunting the living—or whether another way can be built.

But the people behind the human fences have every reason to fear her. Maura herself has already committed an act she can never undo.

With violence escalating and the fragile remains of her memory beginning to disappear, she must decide how much of herself she is willing to sacrifice to give others the freedom to choose.

MAURA is a dark, emotionally charged post-apocalyptic novel about survival, identity, guilt, friendship and the terrifying cost of holding on to humanity after death.