T.S. Spivet lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother who is obsessed with the morphology of beetles, his father (a cowboy born a hundred years too late) and his 14 year-old sister who dreams of becoming Miss America. T.S. is a 10 year-old prodigy with a passion for cartography and scientific inventions. One day, he receives an unexpected call from the Smithsonian museum telling him that he is the winner of the very prestigious Baird prize for his discovery of the perpetual motion machine and that he is invited to a reception in his honor where he is expected to give a speech. Without telling anyone, he sets out on a freight train across the U.S.A. to reach Washington DC. There is also Layton, twin brother of T.S., who died in an accident involving a firearm in the family's barn, which no one ever speaks of. T.S. was with him, measuring the scale of the gunshots for an experiment, and he doesn't understand what happened.

Leonard Grey has been the super of the apartment building Jericho Mansions owned by Lily Melnick for thirty years. Leonard is slow and agoraphobic, as well as having amnesia, and dedicates his leisure time to build a complex bridge with clips. When the husband of the landlady (Lily) dies and she receives a call from her sister that lives in Europe, Lily rebukes Leonard and tries to force him to be fired or arrested by the police, forging evidences that he is a thief. However, most of the dwellers like Leonard and he stays working in the building. When Bill Cherry, husband of the masseuse Donna Cherry and lover of Dolores O'Donell, is murdered in Jericho Mansions during the night, the police investigate. There are many suspects, including Dolores's betrayed husband Eugene; Lily and Leonard. However, Jericho Mansions hides a dark and cruel secret. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Suddenly the US east coast is hit by a type of natural disaster formerly reserved, except after a major earthquake, for the Pacific and Indian ocean rims: tidal waves of the destructive tsunami type. Scientist and fiction author John McAdams attends a national emergency conference which concludes the phenomenon must be man-made, quite possibly abusing the findings of John's secret former Sea Lion project, but who wants to and has the means? Indeed John soon finds himself set-up for a murder and chased. Major destructions mean major contracts for construction and coastal defenses, so building tycoons like Victor Bannister certainly have a considerable interest...