Nobel Son

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."