The Exclusive
by Rebecca Milton
It was the story of a lifetime, the kind of story every reporter dreams of doing. It made her famous, made her money, but what was the cost of that? to the point, was the cost worth the payout? It was hard for her to keep her head straight, because she had become obsessed...The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding, God has a new chosen race and set of entry qualifications. In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die. But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo while awaiting official ruling on their fate: return to the void of death or return outside to the Paris of their twenty-fifth year.They are an ill-assorted lot: randy 1900s marine Louis Forster; Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer; neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein;modern-day foul-mouthed truck-driver, Max Pilsudski; Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of murder after her husband's disappearance in the Paris of the 1950s. And these desperate departed will stop at nothing to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves.