Toby, a gifted chemist slumming as a high school teacher, stops on a quiet stretch of Ozark highway to help an alluring young girl named Laurie whose car trouble--and attraction to the handsome stranger--pales in the face of her real problems: She's on the run from police and involved in a dangerous criminal debt with Jeff, her violent, on-again, off-again boyfriend, who also cons a ride from Toby. With Laurie as a grudging accomplice, Jeff kidnaps Toby to an abandoned farm, hoping to force him to cook synthetic heroin in order to pay off 'Familia Sin Amore', the group of vicious Bolivian drug traffickers to whom he's desperately in debt. When Toby proves unwilling, Jeff with the help of a local thug named Judge Bass, kidnaps Annette, Toby's ex-wife. The criminals hold her as security, threatening to frame Toby for her murder should he escape. The situation grows ever more tense as Toby asks for a share of the profits...

Barkley Michaelson is in a deep life rut. He's struggling to finish his PhD 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 discrete. As if Barkley's world is not bad enough, on the eve of his father receiving the Nobel, Barkley is kidnapped and the requested ransom is the $2,000,000 in Nobel prize money. Needless to say, Eli refuses to pay it and so starts a venomous tale of familial dysfunction, lust, betrayal and ultimately revenge. In the words of Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century philosopher: "There is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead."