Manchild

THE REPTILIAN BRAIN Neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean proposed that the reptilian complex, or reptilian brain, is responsible for aggression, dominance, and territoriality in humans. What if alternative evolutionary development on another planet resulted in a real reptilian species with these characteristics? This species, if they had space travel and found a primitive and pastoral planet like earth, might create a world of nation states battling each other for power and control. The Manchild centers around two extraordinary people and their romance, within the background of a secret intelligence war. Darcy Regier, raped by her drunken father when she was fourteen, claws her way out of the gutter and becomes an elite consort for Royalty Services in Chicago, North America's most exclusive VIP service. Marcus Riley, an intellectual genius with extraordinary psychic abilities, is forced to become a man at the age of seventeen when his parents die in an automobile crash. Darcy falls in love when she leaves Royalty and meets Marcus in Midland Illinois, a college town 150 miles south of Chicago. But the lovers later fall out in a violent argument and Darcy moves to New York. At sixteen Marcus begins to develop unusual mental abilities that later propel him to New York and the hard-driving and exciting life of a high-stakes securities trader. There, Marcus meets Carla Berglund of NYCBank, a hard-edged and beautiful day trader who introduces him to drugs and the seamy side of New York. A heartbroken Darcy watches helplessly as Marcus loses himself and descends into a hell of cocaine and heroin addiction. The story evolves when Holderness Parkinson, Darcy's trusted mentor at Royalty Services and a former senior intelligence officer, discovers the plans of Admiral Frank Conte and Pietro Adolfone, leaders of the rogue Twelve group. The Twelve - a secret intelligence organization composed of powerful families who can trace their elite genetic heritage back to pre-Christian Babylon - have established competing private networks, whose goal is political and economic control of our resource-rich planet. After a long struggle Marcus recovers from his drug-induced collapse. As the two former lovers try to mend their relationship, Parkinson recognizes Marcus' unique mental and psychic abilities, and manipulates the manchild into the secret intelligence war between Adolfone and Conte. One of Adolfone's agents injects Marcus with a deadly bioenhancer developed in a secret black program. The bioenhancer is designed to enhance the human genome but kills nine of ten test subjects, and Marcus almost dies. After his recovery Marcus is determined to help Parkinson track down those behind the manufacture of the biotoxin. But Marcus, Darcy, Parkinson, and world leaders are shocked when they discover that the biotoxin has been distributed and stored in classified facilities all over the world by Adolfone's group, and that behind the Twelve are reptilian extraterrestrials. As The Twelve threaten the world's governments, Parkinson, with Marcus' help, uses his intelligence training to pull together an unlikely alliance of military, intelligence, and classified personnel - including organized crime! - in an attempt to find and destroy the biotoxin before it is released on an unsuspecting world. The Manchild is a tense and ultimately inspiring story of debasement, renewal