Lena’s parents are dead, gunned down in the act of trying to help a stranded motorist. She lives for her younger brother Jozey, and most of the time things go all right. At school, Lena manages to walk the line between the cool, rich, athletic Paladins and the poor goth Heretics, but “the boyfriend” (obligatory, not really emotionally attached) gets her into trouble when he asks her to be his mule on a short drug run.

As if Lena’s struggles to care for Jozey, navigate the school cliques, and now keep her head down during a police investigation weren’t enough, two new boys move to Avalon. Beels and Chael both meddle in Lena’s life and both attract her, but they are locked into a struggle between the two of them, a struggle that seems to have been going on for a long, long time.

Aaron Michael Ritchey is a Colorado mystic, an unabashed romantic, and a writer who likes to bring the feels. All those things shine through in The Never Prayer, a luminous tale of love, pain, drug dealing, and a young woman caught between an angel and a devil — and not always sure which is which.

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