Elena Gonzalez Schwartz, 65 years still-idealist Canadian Socialist-activist writer and self-made contemporary mountain woman, has her hands full trying to (a) hold on to her job at a local newspaper where her attempts to write real stories are quenched by a stuck up and popular power bitch editor, (b) keep her own horses/dogs fed at home along with the strays that find their way to her door, (c) serving the medical needs of the neighborhood critters without a license to practice medicine and (d) processing the death of yet another Old German, her beloved landlord, who died of cancer in her beloved haven of Freshwater, BC, a small mountain town which is dying slowly, economically and psychologically. Enter, unexpectedly and without explanation, Elena’s biologically younger but ‘more mature’ sister, Carlata, a Right Wing Capitalist who left her backwoods Canadian home to become a success in New York, and by all accounts known to Elena anyway, has become so. Carlata and Elena are forced to deal with the legacy and circumstances of their Radical Socialist mother’s death, the finding of mineral wealth on the mountain which could change the future of Freshwater forever (for better or worse), and ghosts from their past who pit them against each other at a time when unification is essential for their own survival, as well as many, perhaps innocent, bystanders around them.

Jack Bauman, humble, humanistic and mild mannered indy neuroscientist, assisted by his underappreciated yet beloved female post doc (Carla Timons), discover a drug (XY57) that cures learned helplessness in rats which promises to be a money making miracle treatment for paralytic depression in people, particularly those who need to find their inner Power and Real Voice. Jack’s commercial, money hungry, fame-seeking and very jealous old guard competitor, R. Thomas Schleem, gets wind of XY57 when Jack and Carla try to get the animal data published. Schleem not only tries to sabotage the young Assistant Professor’s reputation in the scientific Academic circles, but sends in spies to steal the formula for the drug and the services of Carla. Genuine scientific curiosity and the temptation to use XY57 to turn normal people into powerful supermen result in the highly addictive drug getting into key people in the general human population, resulting in a world where lower human desires and primal destructive urges threaten to destroy both intellectual reason and basic human compassion. Alliances shift, then get redefined, as Bauman, Timons and Schleem dive deep into themselves, utilizing their special abilities to save humanity from itself, as well as to catapult it into self annihilation.

Like virtually every other POW holding facility in North America, the German soldiers in Camp 359. buried deep in the Louisianna Bayou are given clothes, food, shelter, recreational activity and a healthy helping of  Democracy which is designed to de-Nazify them. So it appears in the press and to the brass anyway, though the reality of life there is far different due the wheelings and dealings of US Army Commandant Major Horatio Smith. The former Police Chief of the Parish and local Kingpin abuses, sells, kills, steals from and extorts whatever he can from the German POWs just as he does to any Colored soldier or civilian who is unfortunate to be under his command, or within the boundaries of his kingdom. Attempting to see that the German POWs, most of whom were drafted and are NOT Nazis, are treated humanely, and that upidy Colored souls in Lord Horatio’s domain are spared lynching, is Major Wilhelm Whitaker, a brilliant and compassionate German Army Doctor who, despite wearing a German uniform, is as anti-Nazi as one can be. Whitaker has a secret past which fuels his dedication to saving humanity wherever he can. But if found out, it could severely limit his ability to help anyone in need, as well as allow the demons lingering inside of him to take him over. By ‘coincidence’, Wilhelm’s half brother, a brutal, clever and brilliantly manipulative SS Officer, gets sent to the Camp, setting into motion a chain of events that not only threatens Whitaker’s attempts to save as many lives as he can, but could unleash a rein of Fascist terror that would destroy the very fabric of American Democratic life, even if the US forces in Europe win the War.

In a futuristic spiritually-sterile, artistically-dead, high-tech and pathologically gender neutral earth that is rapidly moving from stress-less to globally destructive , two mismatched scientists are clandestinely assigned by their boss a special Mission. To create a new ‘Adam and Eve’ to spawn a new race of humans with vitality and intelligence. Such involves somehow teaching two unwilling and uncaring candidates about the ancient, primitive and often destructive phenomenon called ‘love’ which current research says is the elusive secret ingredient during the time of conception and beyond that will save humanity from itself, and its new Big Boss, whose secret past and agenda is at the core of it all.

Carla and Karen Steiner are identical twins born to pathologically Norman Rockwell normal parents in the flatland town of Hillside, Saskatchewan, Canada, where they brought up and expected to have identical lives as adults. But things change when their ill parents die in a car accident on a balmy minus 30 degree afternoon, leaving to each of them a substantial 'buy whatever kind of life you want to build for yourself' inheritance. Karen decides to do the responsible thing, putting aside her talent and love for making music to attempt a go at medical school so she can find cures for the diseases that afflicted her parents, even though she has absolutely no fascination or interest in biology or medicine. Carla decides to do the Alive thing, pursuing a career as a multigenre artist to serve, despite the fact that she has less talent in the arts a her sister and knows nothing about how cut-throat the Artistic world is. The story about how their lives evolve, devolve and become redefined is told to an underachieving, cynical nurse at a psych facility by an eccentric Doc with deep, dark and powerful secrets of his own.