Only good Americans are allowed to return, young again, to the paradise of Paris. But the divinely-ordered bureaucracy slips up and five not-so-good Americans find themselves posthumously thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo. The ill-assorted departed will stop at nothing to return to the land of the living and repair fractured loves and flawed lives.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.

The nameless Seventh Candidate helps Edmond Lorz in his war against obscene graffiti on subway posters. Obsessed like his employer by the need for order in a chaotic society, won't the disquieting employee be tempted to go even further by eliminating the scrawlers of those obscenities themselves?In an age of plummeting morals and urban chaos verging on civil war, businessman Edmond Lorz makes a precarious living by removing obscene graffiti from subway advertising posters. It's during a recruitment aptitude test for extra porn-purging staff that a terrorist bomb rips through "Ideal Poster's" grubby headquarters, leaving Lorz and one candidate--the seventh--fighting for life in hospital. Lorz recovers completely, but the strikingly handsome young job-seeker wakens from his coma a blank-faced, unspeaking automaton with total amnesia and a blind obsession with his new employer's clean-up campaign. Adopted by Lorz and his wildly unpredictable secretary, Dorothea--each driven by pity, love and stark fear--the mysterious Seventh Candidate wages a private and manic war on disorder in a subterranean maze of tunnels beneath a city gone mad. ****Howard Waldman's latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that's almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heart rending tragedy-- and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map

Ailing Harvey Morgenstern tries to convince Jerry Weizman that his time machine can allow return to Rachel Rosen, dead in mysterious circumstances long ago and loved by the two young men. But doesn't Harvey want to expose his once rival to the rays of the machine that are killing its inventor? And why does Jerry try to sabotage the return to Rachel? The answers to these questions are startling.Harvey Morgenstern promises miracles but the dying genius’ so-called time-machine is anything but impressive : a dusty old black-and-white TV in the basement stuck on one channel and showing a table-leg out of the 1930’s, the ghostly image of a conversation between two long-dead women, a pair of dogs in ancient endless copulation.Harvey promises better things to his penniless assistant and former friend Jerry Weizman : a way to slow down time and project oneself back to loved-ones, above all back to Rachel Rosen, dead in mysterious circumstances half a century earlier, and loved by the two young men.Jerry is slowly sucked down into Harvey’s obsession. He too seems to voyage back to the time of their youth. But how much of their visions are subjective distortions due to drugs, alcohol, yearning or growing mental unbalance? Why has Harvey hired him after decades of estrangement following Rachel’s death? Isn’t it to expose him to the rays of the time machine that are killing its inventor? Why does Jerry try to sabotage return to Rachel?All those questions. And at the end startling answers.Harvey Morgenstern promises miracles but the dying genius’ so-called time-machine is anything but impressive : a dusty old black-and-white TV in the basement stuck on one channel and showing a table-leg out of the 1930’s, the ghostly image of a conversation between two long-dead women, a pair of dogs in ancient endless copulation.Harvey promises better things to his penniless assistant and former friend Jerry Weizman : a way to slow down time and project oneself back to loved-ones, above all back to Rachel Rosen, dead in mysterious circumstances half a century earlier, and loved by the two young men.Jerry is slowly sucked down into Harvey’s obsession. He too seems to voyage back to the time of their youth. But how much of their visions are subjective distortions due to drugs, alcohol, yearning or growing mental unbalance? Why has Harvey hired him after decades of estrangement following Rachel’s death? Isn’t it to expose him to the rays of the time machine that are killing its inventor? Why does Jerry try to sabotage return to Rachel?All those questions. And at the end startling answers.Harvey Morgenstern promises miracles but the dying genius’ so-called time-machine is anything but impressive : a dusty old black-and-white TV in the basement stuck on one channel and showing a table-leg out of the 1930’s, the ghostly image of a conversation between two long-dead women, a pair of dogs in ancient endless copulation.Harvey promises better things to his penniless assistant and former friend Jerry Weizman : a way to slow down time and project oneself back to loved-ones, above all back to Rachel Rosen, dead in mysterious circumstances half a century earlier, and loved by the two young men.Jerry is slowly sucked down into Harvey’s obsession. He too seems to voyage back to the time of their youth. But how much of their visions are subjective distortions due to drugs, alcohol, yearning or growing mental unbalance? Why has Harvey hired him after decades of estrangement following Rachel’s death? Isn’t it to expose him to the rays of the time machine that are killing its inventor? Why does Jerry try to sabotage return to Rachel?All those questions. And at the end startling answers.