A young man, Kent Mullins, is given a poison that will activate and kill him in one year if he doesn't come up the antidote. To gain the antidote he must find the solution to a heretofore unsolvable philosophical puzzle. His race with death is non-stop and carries the reader to a prison of psychopathic killers, a mental hospital run by a lovesick psychiatrist, to New York, to Russia, to the Amazon, and to a cocaine village in Colombia. The road to Kent's salvation is cluttered with bodies and eccentric characters: a Dolly Parton impersonator, a bungling government agent, an oddball Russian philosopher, an evangelist bent on using a supercomputer and cocaine to conquer the world, and more--much more.