The Seraphs Call - Synopsis

The Seraph’s Call - Synopsis

World scientists foresee that during the next few decades, the rate of virus and bacterial mutation will far out-strip the pace of medical advancement.  If effective action is not taken, if new ways are not developed to treat the rampant spread of disease, humanity may well be doomed to one last deadly scourge.  These future portents will rouse the nightmarish specter of Armageddon.

            In 2033, at the age of five, young Gabriel Scott’s life almost ends.  Losing both of his parents in catastrophic oil rig explosion, he is taken in by his maternal grandfather Joshua Scott, an aging farmer, whose strength is the only thing that hold’s Gabriel’s scarred psyche together as the boy’s astonishing intellect starts to grow. 

            Nurtured by his grandfather, and watched over by the mysterious Damien DeMoir, Gabriel’s knowledge increases at an astronomical rate.  Difficulty arises when he is ready for college, his natural drive and adeptness at performing the established impossible, bruises more then a few egos.  Graduating M.I.T. at age sixteen with a doctorate in Microcomputers and Robotics Engineering, he comes to a crisis point in his life, accept the aid of a mysterious government agency or be forever barred from entering medical school to finish the half-formed dream of his thirst for knowledge.  He makes the bargain with the “devil” that inevitably decides the course of his life.

            In his residency at Johns Hopkins, Gabriel is dealt, by life, an almost fatal blow.  At the apex of Gabriel’s accomplishment, Joshua Scott is struck by Cancer.  In a feverish attempt to save his grandfather’s life, the only person he has left in the world, he works himself into the ground. Even as the cure is within Gabriel’s grasp, the elder Scott dies.  If not for the support of his newfound love in the form of one Illiana Andropov, he would not have had the strength to make it through.  Spurred on by feelings of guilt and a need to prove himself, Gabriel develops the cure six months after Joshua’s death.

            It is a DNA virus designed to attack and reprogram from the inside the killer cells that compromise Cancer.  Known as the “Gabriel Virus,” the discovery wins him world renown, including the Nobel Prize for medicine.  Yet his strength fails him again, and having pushed all that he cared about from him, even Illiana, during his fight to find the cure, he retreats from the world, defying even the government agency that holds a claim to all but his soul.  Yet he must find the strength to heal the wounds of his mind, for a higher calling, the fate of a world comes into the balance.  And his calling has a name.  A new virus that threatens to destroy mankind.

            The virus is called Lucifer X, because of the hellish aspects of its victims' demise.  Rising from the densely populated regions of inland China, in five years, it sweeps across the globe bringing a staggering toll of over 2 billion dead.  Caught in the maelstrom of a disintegrating world, Dr. Gabriel Scott holds the key to the salvation of a dying race.

            There are those who would block his efforts at any cost.  In the halls of power in Washington D.C. a ruthless President, Theodore Porter, and a power mad Army scientist by the name of Roger Janus, seek to hide the most malignant of secrets.  They would sacrifice millions of lives to keep Scott from unraveling the secrets of Lucifer X, for it would bring into the light of day that source of human death is of their own devising--a military experiment in genetic manipulation gone horribly wrong.

            Pitted against the might of the most powerful nation on Earth, Gabriel Scott, and his menagerie of companions--Colonel Darryl Rathborn ex-special forces and former Army security head of the Aberdeen proving grounds, Damien DeMoir a recluse billionaire and reputed head of the infamous French Quarter Crime Syndicate of New Orleans, Dr. Shelby Holiday perhaps Gabriel’s only close friend and a brilliant geneticist, Dr. Illiana Andropov a cell physiologist and a lover from Gabriel’s past, and the Nanite Artificial Intelligence A.N.G.E.L (Artificial Nanite Genome Enhanced Life form)--must all work their way through the heart of human greed and malevolence.

            The bitter medicine that they find will be, in ways, more terrible then the plague it cures and in other instances, the greatest triumph of science upon the human condition.  Is a cure that bares the truth of the human soul worse than death?

 

Reviews

[Hans von Lieven]

This has the markings of a great book. The storyline has all the elements necessary for such a work and your eloquence is up to the task. I shall read this book with great interest. It is refreshing to read a tale where the spelling is correct and the grammar has not been raped, not too common an event here :-)

Hans von Lieven