Chromosome 47 is a fountain of youth that can cure illness, bring back the near-dead, and add hundreds of years to life with only one drawback: a loss of memory.

 

Murderous business rivals contend for this genetically-based secret of prolonged life, and

don’t care about the crippling side effects. These powerful people compete with each other for control of this revolutionary discovery, and think killing their opposition makes good business sense.

 

Leo Black is the CEO of the Life Pharmaceutical Corporation. He is a ruthless, greedy man, and when his Chief Scientist, Walter Ralston, builds a new chromosome and finds a way to deliver it to specific cell nuclei, the future seems very bright….Except the increased longevity and improved physical powers are accompanied by irreversible memory loss that the recipient soon comes to regret.

 

When Walter Ralston threatens to quit and go public with the damaging news, Leo Black has his henchmen – William and Matthew Garvin, identical twins – eliminate anyone with insider knowledge of the problem and the potential to blow the whistle.

 

An incurably ill billionaire named Thadius Cutler hires two killers - Cookie and Boris – to acquire the potential cure for his personal use, no holds barred.

 

Multiple killings in NYC and Westchester that include Walter Ralston, his son Joe, and others, draw the attention of Detective John Myers, a decorated and respected policemen, who eventually becomes a victim himself, but not before he has involved Sheriff Derek Youngblood, a lawman from Pequod, Maine, to investigate the case to its conclusion.

 

The activities of two disparate groups drive the narrative. First, Cosmo Ralston and Willie Butler, the first two guinea pigs of Walter Ralston’s experimentation. Cosmo is Walter’s “heir-apparent” and tries to carry his “father’s work“ forward. Willie’s memory is lost after repeated exposure to chromosome 47 and he struggles to survive in a world he doesn’t understand, with Cosmo as his protector. Cosmo records his research findings on a CD that become the target of Leo Black’s desperate efforts to capitalize on the chromosome 47 project, and Leo dispatches the Garvin brothers to find Cosmo and Willie when they flee with the CD.

 

Second, Sheriff Youngblood, his fiancé Jessica, and her father. The father, a heavy drinker with terminal cancer, has several major secrets that have dramatically affected all their lives and now threaten their futures. Like what really happened when the sheriff’s parents died thirteen years ago?   And what happened to Jessica’s husband Tony when it was learned he was a wife beater?

 

Sheriff Youngblood, drawn into the quest for chromosome 47 when Cosmo, Willie and the bad guys descend on Pequod, must deal with the murderous problems created, while sorting out his own difficult relationships with Jessica and her father, especially when Jessica and Willie become romantically involved.