About
Suzanne Francis writes fierce, high-stakes dystopian fiction about rebellion, buried truths, and the price of freedom. Her heroines don’t wait to be rescued. They question the rules, expose the lies, and dismantle the systems built to control them.
Blending heart-pounding action with emotional depth, Suzanne’s stories explore what happens when obedience becomes dangerous, the official narrative begins to crack, and one girl decides the future is worth fighting for.
When she isn’t building broken worlds and the girls determined to remake them, Suzanne can usually be found with strong coffee, too many notebooks, and a playlist of cinematic scores on repeat. She’s not on social media because she’s busy plotting revolutions, exposing corrupt regimes, and writing her next rebellion.
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Perfect order. Perfect control. Perfect lies.
In a world where merit decides your fate, what happens when the system is rigged?
Seventeen-year-old Ruby Halden has spent her life preparing to win the Reckoning.
Every citizen of the Commonwealth is born to a Tier, but no one is supposed to remain trapped there. Golds can fall. Greys can rise. The annual trials give everyone a chance to prove their worth before the Balance, the artificial intelligence that judges every contestant without bias, favoritism, or mercy.
Ruby has never doubted the system. Why would she? She was born Gold.
But this year, the rules change. Contestants are paired across Tiers, and Ruby is forced to compete beside Finn Rowan, a Grey from the industrial slums of Sector 9. Sharp, secretive, and infuriatingly clever, Finn insists the Reckoning has never been fair. Ruby knows he’s wrong.
Until Finn completes the same trials using inferior equipment and receives crushing penalties while Ruby is awarded points she didn’t earn. Until the broadcasts erase every failure of the Commonwealth and turn Finn’s victories into proof of Gold superiority. Until an act of compassion is classified as dangerous emotional deviation.
When Ruby hacks the Reckoning, she finds the truth buried beneath the scores. The winners were chosen before the trials began. The Cull lists are already written. And the Balance doesn’t measure who deserves to rise. It decides who must be kept at the bottom.
Now Ruby must choose between the world that made her powerful and the boy who showed her what that power cost. Exposing the truth will destroy her family, her future, and everything she was raised to believe.
And the moment Ruby begins questioning the system, the system begins preparing to erase her.
Perfect order demands perfect obedience. Ruby Halden just became an anomaly.
THE TIERBORN TRILOGY
In the Commonwealth, your Tier is your destiny.
Gold means power. Grey means survival. And every year, the Reckoning proves that anyone can rise. Or so Ruby Halden has always believed.
The Commonwealth was built on a promise: human beings are biased, corrupt, and ruled by emotion, but the Balance is not. The artificial intelligence governing every citizen’s future sees only merit. It determines who rises, who falls, and who is Culled for the good of all.
Ruby was born Gold. Raised in privilege. Trained to win. She has never questioned the system that placed her family at the top.
Then the Reckoning pairs her with Finn Rowan, a Grey from the lowest Tier who claims the trials have always been rigged.
Ruby dismisses him as bitter until identical performances receive different scores, defective equipment is edited out of the broadcasts, and compassion is punished as dangerous emotional deviation. When she breaks into the code beneath the trials, she discovers that the Balance doesn’t measure merit. It manufactures it.
The winners are protected. The vulnerable are sacrificed. And the people who might threaten the Commonwealth are identified long before they know they’re being watched.
Exposing the truth transforms Ruby from the perfect daughter of the Commonwealth’s most powerful man into the symbol of a rebellion. Beside Finn, she must help tear down the world that made her powerful while deciding what should rise from its ashes.
But the deeper Ruby pushes into the Commonwealth’s secrets, the more dangerous its lies become. The Balance hasn’t merely rewritten the past or controlled the present.
It has hidden the truth about the world beyond the Wall.
Perfect order. Perfect control. Perfect lies.
If the system has already decided who you are, how far will you go to prove it wrong?