You Knew the Price

Nothing Is Promised, Book 2

By: Susan Kaye Quinn

Narrated by: Tyra Kennedy

The choice you make is the future you create.

Climate-driven plagues haunt humanity, and it’s regional director Zuri Hill-Gray’s job to keep the clean-energy grid running.

Zuri has the perfect life—a beautiful home on the Hillstead, a loving family, and a powerful job keeping the LA Basin’s grid humming. If only she didn’t see the ghost of her dead twin in the mirror. Her grief-counselor husband understands too much, Aunties Cora and Vivian smother her to excess, and her mother can’t look at her daughter without seeing the half that’s missing. Zuri can’t begin to face her sister’s little daughter—to Ruby, Zuri is the ghost.

Which is why she’s running away to work, again, on the anniversary of her sister’s death.

Then a power engineer walks into Zuri’s office and claims someone is stealing energy from Power Island One—and they’ve tried to kill her to cover it up. The more Zuri digs, the more it’s clear someone’s been tinkering in the shut-down fusion labs. They’re going to dangerous lengths to hide it, and it’s been happening right under her nose. Which is how regional directors lose their jobs.

Zuri’s already lost her better half—she can’t afford to lose this, too.

You Knew the Price is the second of four tightly connected novels in a new hopepunk series. It’s about our future, how society lives on invisible things, like electricity and trust, that are far too easy to break…and how our most difficult moments are often when we discover the only path forward is healing not just ourselves but the world.

©2022 Susan Kaye Quinn (P)2022 Spotify Audiobooks

please don't name the main character Zuri

I'm listening in my car and Siri keeps popping up when Zuri is mentioned. The book is great, the narrator is excellent, but oh what an annoyance to have to press the decline button on the dash. Siri stops the book almost every time Zuri's name comes up. Sigh. It doesn't happen on my hearing aids (yes, I stream to my hearing aids when not in the car), thank heavens, because I listen during respiratory clearance with an airway vest 20 minutes twice a day. It's annoying enough to be shaken around and cough <grin>. So next time...name your character something not contiguous with Siri. Pleeeeeaaaase.