Dreamworld

When it comes to crime in Dreamworld, the sprawling Florida vacation resort might as well be never-never land. That's because the bad things that happen there never reach the press. As an ambitious rookie cop on the community's security force, twenty-five-year-old Sylvia Avery toes the company line, smoothing over disturbances that might tarnish the utopian image of Dreamworld and its hugely popular ImagiNation theme park.

But that flawless facade is shattered when a horrific murder-suicide takes place "on property." Thrown into a company-sponsored cover-up, Avery discovers bizarre and disturbing experiments taking place at Dreamworld's ultrasecret research center. Torn between her loyalty to her new boss -- and lover -- and a need to uncover the terrifying truth, Avery enters the dark and twisted world beneath Dreamworld's picture-perfect surface. Now, in a place where fantasy rules and illusion is everything, Avery is about to come face-to-face with a cold and deadly reality.

Jane Goldman is the author of The Official X-Files Book of the Unexplained. She lives in London.