Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates are Canadian dot.com wunderboys, on a trade mission in Brazil to sell their intriguing concept for a new website -- Hypothesys is a virtual "morality machine" that promises to take the agony out of making choices, helping people to make the "best decisions of their lives."

But the decision that the Hypothesys team makes to take an eco-tour boat ride up the Rio Negro River into the Amazon Jungle -- accompanied by a band of leech-like Canadian trade bureaucrats -- will determine their future lives -- and deaths. Their boat is captured by unknown assailants who brutally kill the crew and kidnap the Hypothesys team, now led blindfolded to a stinking jungle pit prison. Except for the odd omission of Crossman, the team’s enigmatic translator, one by one the team is tortured and tested beyond reasonable understanding. Have their captors confused them with government officials from another boat? Has one of them secretly sold out? No one knows, but when an opportunity to escape presents itself, the team flees back to the river -- each one embarking on their own desperate journey into the heart of darkness.

Like Lost Girls, Pyper's first international bestseller, The Trade Mission is a unique hybrid novel. It's a story for the Virtual Age that takes psychological suspense to an almost unbearable new level.

ANDREW PYPER is the author of Lost Girls, his highly acclaimed first novel that was a bestseller in Canada, in the Top 10 on the TimesUK paperback list and in the Top 30 of The New York Times paperback bestseller list. The novel was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times and is currently being adapted for the screen. His second novel, The Trade Mission, was selected as a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by the Toronto Star and was published in Canada, the US and the UK to great acclaim. Pyper is also theauthor of Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. While researching and writing The Wildfire Season, he spent three of the past five summers living in the Yukon. His home is in Toronto. Visit his website at www.andrewpyper.com.

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