I am seeking avid fiction readers to test read my novel manuscript for me. The novel, called PROMISED LAND, is about 90,000 words. If you email me, I’ll send you a PDF of the manuscript and a short questionnaire designed to elicit critical feedback. If it’s returned in a timely fashion (I’m trying to get as many of these by the week of April 6th as possible) I have a small gift for you as a token of my appreciation. Here’s the novel pitch below; let me know at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com if you’re interested.

PROMISED LAND/Celebrity journalist Riley Vasquez found the story of a lifetime in media magnate Oscar Vesveld, the man who wanted to live forever. He found a way to preserve his brain and exist indefinitely as an avatar in a virtual world called Paradise — just a few upgrades better than the Second Life and World of Warcraft games people play now. For a fee, he’d preserve anyone else too. Soon a handful of rich souls joined him in cheating death, and remaking their lives as idealized images of their former selves. But when Riley introduces her next profile subject — a pious tent revival singer turned reality television star — to Vesveld’s world, this mystic’s different vision of Paradise threatens to destroy everything he’s worked for. Starting with his reasons for wanting to live forever in the first place.

Written by an award-winning journalist, and as fast-paced and steeped in religious imagery as The Da Vinci Code, PROMISED LAND jets from game preserves in Africa to the slums of Delhi, from Philadelphia in the midst of a summer trash strike to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Riley — unsure of what she believes and reluctantly caught up in manifestations of the divine — starts to ask what it means to be human. In a world where technology can destroy death but can’t change human nature, how do we get to the Promised Land? This is a book for suspense fans who like their prose colorful — and who like to think while they read.