The Hallorans cheat at cards.For generations they have known ow to deal, when to fold, and how not to get backed into corners. They communicate with signs and quiet symbols, and what they say is not what they mean. Like his father and brother, Charlie has spent his young life manipulating everyone he meets into handing over just what he needs of them. But he's still playing in the kinds of games that leave scars. And he has just pushed one mark too many a little further than he should.When he meets Lia O'Donel, a beautiful mathematician whose specialty is chaos, he knows as a gambler knows that the time has come to shed the games and the sweet high they give him.So his father and his brother offer him a chance to do just that, in one last beautifully dangerous gamble on a luxurious sailboat off the coast of Hawaii.In this extraordinarily gripping, sensous, and suspensful novel, we watch Charlie struggle against his birthright toward a place where people mean what they say, where honest emotion is part of the gamble, and where the threat to his heart is as real as the threats to his life.