What if someone you love gambled on her life...Games are serious business on Salaria, and the stakes are high. When Kia's older sister, in a desperate bid to erase their family debt, loses the game and forfeits her freedom, Kia is determined to rescue her.

When Kia arrives on Salaria, she learns it's a world where a few key players control the board, and the pawns are ready to revolt. Kia joins the conflict in order to save her sister. As if she doesn't already have enough to handle, Agatha, the maddeningly calm Select who lives life both by-the-book and off-the-cuff — and always at the wrong time, according to Kia — shows up to help, along with handsome Norio, a strong-willed desert girl with her own agenda, and a group of Salarian teens earning their rite of passage in the treacherous desert game.

What can an interpreter and former thief possibly do in the midst of all this to keep the people she loves alive?

J.A. McLachlan's profile page

J. A. McLachlan
is the Canadian author of a short story collection, Connections: Parables for Today; a science fiction novel, Walls of Wind; and a young adult novel, The Occasional Diamond Thief. The Salarian Desert Game is the second book in her young adult science fiction series.