Harmon "Buddy" Graves is drowning. At age 32, he has lost his job, the value of his home has plummeted, his marriage is troubled, and Buddy has no idea that he is about to have an encounter that will plunge his life even deeper into chaos. Book One of the DREAMLAND series opens on a blistering summer morning. Buddy is standing before his bathroom mirror shaving when the 7-year-old black girl from next door creeps up the stairs and crouches behind him, in tears. Inadvertently left home alone, she's frightened and seeks his help. Clad only in a gaping robe, Buddy, a white man, coaxes the child down the steps and onto the front porch, holding fast to her as she sobs. Then, the next door neighbor snaps a cell-phone image. In that searing moment, with the sound of the mechanical click expanding in the air, Buddy becomes ensnared in a humiliating game of Internet blackmail. Inspired by a real life incident, this chilling event catapults readers into DREAMLAND, a contemporary story about the fragility of chasing the American dream. Much like the movie Crash, the plot of this character-driven serial drama focuses on three couples from different social classes and the ways in which their lives collide and intertwine. Written in a propulsive and muscular style, DREAMLAND delves headlong into the economic and racial tensions that underlie American life, the determination to make one's mark, and the menace of techno vandalism that threatens to strip us of our privacy.
About the Author: To watch the DREAMLAND trailer and for more information on us and our unputdownable fiction, go to www.Heads4Tales.blogspot.com Ron Piana has written more than a hundred articles, interviews, and profiles published in leading medical journals. In his 20s, Ron lived in Paris for a year, then traveled worldwide as a merchant seaman, later working as a laborer, truck driver, and chef. His life-long boxing aspirations were stymied after going a round in Gleason's Gym with the legendary Roberto Duran on one thrilling but boxing career-ending day. Those experiences, plus a childhood of summers with his wild kin in the backwoods of rural Florida helped nourish the power of his fiction. Randi Londer Gould has co-authored six non-fiction books on topics as diverse as cats, kids, cancer, and climate change. Now that she has shifted her focus to fiction, she is positively gleeful about her new license to make stuff up. A graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Randi has served as managing editor for medical journals and a magazine for cancer patients, and has written articles and profiles in Parade and Family Circle, among other publications.