I have recently completed my first novel entitled Venice Beach. It's 360 pages of contemporary / upmarket fiction. Think Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Good Squad" meets the movie Crash. As you read this, I'm in the process of shopping it around for representation and hope that it will be on bookshelves sooner rather than later. Below is the synopsis:
Venice Beach is a (103,000 word) novel told from six different perspectives. Here we are introduced to Sherman Brown, a lonely, neurotic cop in search of love, whose job it is to maintain some sense of order in this eclectic beachfront community; however, its diverse lot of inhabitants, each with their own story to tell, some serious and others downright ridiculous and comical, make this quite difficult. The cast of characters includes Eduardo and Gabriela, a young Hispanic couple who are in servitude to the ruthless drug cartel that smuggled them into America; Jasmine the all-knowing palm reader who has been granted three wishes, which through a series of comical misunderstandings, believes they’re coming true; Marquette, a runaway in the ranks of a rag-tag group called the Anarchists, who have their anti-capitalist ideals tested when they come across a pile of money; Daniel, a Jewish boy whose orthodox family forbids him from seeing the Muslim girl he loves; and Jerry, a hermit who has been hiding from his heinous past until his wife finally tracks him down after two decades.
Throughout the novel, all of the characters’ stories including Sherman’s unfold over the course of a year, and we discover just how intertwined their lives really are. All of them are united by their search for rebirth and personal renaissance; and although their reasons for coming to Venice Beach to do this are as different as their motley traits, they are all at a pivotal intersection in life with choices to make and directions to turn.