Sweetland Trilogy

For those left behind, the act of cross­ing over to Sweet­land is, lit­er­ally, no dif­fer­ent than death, but Joe Lar­ivee has seen the other side, and now he must decide: is Sweet­land real, and, if so, does he fol­low his daugh­ter and lover and escape from the hell Earth has become, or does he stay and fight for the unfor­tu­nate ones he has spent his life serv­ing, and, in the process, just maybe redeem him­self for the betrayal which eats at his conscience?

In 2027, the oceans have risen by 14 meters, oil is increas­ingly scarce, and the econ­omy has col­lapsed under the weight of mass migra­tions and food short­ages. The gov­ern­ment, under a ruth­less com­bi­na­tion of mar­tial law and law­less cor­po­rate rule, is engaged in end­less wars, and a fran­tic effort to keep out a flood of refugees.

Social worker Joe Lar­ivee is just try­ing to sur­vive as a sin­gle father with a fourteen-year-old daugh­ter in Port­land, Ore­gon. Joe is a bit of a lud­dite, but when chil­dren start to go miss­ing, he is drawn into a world of vir­tual real­ity called New Life.

In 2027, vir­tual worlds are as life­like as the real world. But the real world is so bleak that mil­lions of poor peo­ple have retreated from their hor­ri­ble exis­tance into New Life, the ulti­mate con­sumer utopia.

What Joe finds, with the help of inworld detec­tive, Claire Deluna, is fright­en­ing. It seems that many young peo­ple are con­vinced they can tele­port to another planet, called Sweet­land, from within New Life. Joe’s daugh­ter, Jessie, is among them. Now, bod­ies are being dis­cov­ered in aban­doned warehouses.

Is Sweet­land real, or a mar­ket­ing scam? Or is it some sort of mass-suicide reli­gious cult? When Jessie goes miss­ing, Joe must look inside him­self to dis­cover the truth, and the answers to his life.

This novel is a black com­edy, which explores the mean­ing of real­ity and hope, and how one man can find redemp­tion and the courage to carry on in the face of par­a­lyz­ing loss.