Lisa J Lickel

UnderCut Lisa J Lickel

When you are loved, you have everything to lose...




Lily Masters was born with a deformity that shaped her life. When she, white and rural-raised, and Cam Taylor, a biracial army medic and literary professor who left his work under a cloud of suspicion, meet, fall in love, and get engaged, Lily decides it's time to take control of her body in order to feel whole. She schedules plastic reconstructive surgery in Texas and leaves Cam and her nephew Kenny, also of mixed heritage, who they're planning to adopt, back home in Wisconsin to wait.

The nightmare begins when Cam can't get a response about Lily's condition from the hospital and both his friend Matt the newspaper editor and his sister Georgia send him a horrifying news story about murder and mayhem at the Southern Shore Medical Center in Houston where Lily is supposedly under the knife.

But whose knife? A terrifying ring of human organ black marketers harvest organs from unwilling victims to meet the demand for transplants as the procedures become less risky and the race to create engineered organs fails.

In Lily's case, she's not only the victim of black marketers, she's a target for revenge. The international terrorist family, the Limms, want payback for the loss of a favored son when Lily helped expose their international sex-trafficking operation. Her plastic surgery was the only success when she wakes without kidneys.

"You'll never see the face of your lover again," Old Man Limm promises. "And your body will slowly rot in its own poison."

As their friends and family gather around them, Cam and Lily wonder about their future together and whether being whole is a solitary or communal endeavor.