प्लॉट

A professor of chemistry wins the Nobel Prize. His wife joins him to Stockholm, but his son, working on his Ph.D., get kidnapped, and the ransom demanded is exactly the Nobel Prize sum: $2,000,000.

Barkley Michaelson's life is stuck into a deep rut. He's struggling to finish his Ph.D. thesis when his father, the learned Eli Michaelson, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Barkley and his mother Sarah, a renowned forensic psychiatrist, now have the ill-fortune of living with a man-eating monster whose philandering ways have gotten less and less discreet. On the eve of his father receiving the Nobel, Barkley is kidnapped and the requested ransom is $2,000,000--the Nobel Prize money. Eli refuses to pay it, touching off a venomous tale of familial dysfunction, lust, betrayal, and ultimately revenge. In the words of 16th-century philosopher Michel De Montaigne: "There is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead."—Randall Miller & Jody Savin