The Manchild - Kenneth James MacLean

The Manchild centers around two extraordinary people and their romance, within the background of a secret intelligence war.

Darcy Regier was raped by her drunken father when she was fourteen. She claws her way out of the gutter and becomes an elite consort for Royalty Services in Chicago, North America's most exclusive VIP service. Marcus Riley is an intellectual genius with extraordinary psychic abilities. Marcus is forced to become a man at the age of seventeen when his parents die in an automobile crash.

Darcy falls in love when she leaves Royalty and meets Marcus in Midland Illinois, a college town 150 miles south of Chicago. The lovers later fall out in a violent argument and Darcy moves to New York. At sixteen Marcus begins to develop unusual mental abilities that later propel him to New York and the hard-driving and exciting life of a high-stakes security trader.

There, Marcus meets Carla Waverley of NYCBank. Carla is a hard-edged and beautiful day trader who introduces him to drugs and the seamy side of New York. A heartbroken Darcy watches helplessly as Marcus loses himself and descends into cocaine and heroin addiction.

The story evolves when Holderness Parkinson discovers the plans of Admiral Frank Conte and Pietro Adolfone. Parkinson was Darcy's trusted mentor at Royalty Services and was a former senior intelligence officer. Conte and Adolfone are leaders of the rogue Twelve group. The Twelve is a secret intelligence organization composed of powerful families who can trace their elite genetic heritage back to pre-Christian Babylon.  Their goal is to maintain the current economic and political structures in the face of demands for change.

After a long struggle Marcus recovers from his drug-induced collapse. The two former lovers try to mend their relationship. Parkinson recognizes Marcus' unique mental and psychic abilities. He manipulates the manchild into the secret intelligence war between Adolfone and Conte.

Marcus, Darcy, Parkinson, and world leaders are shocked when they discover that an airborne bioenhancer has been distributed and stored in classified facilities all over the world by Adolfone's group. The bioenhancer is a seminal advance in gene alteration that enhances the immune system and results in increased lifespans. Unfortunately it also kills 9 out of every 10 people exposed to it. Parkinson, with Marcus' help, uses his intelligence training to pull together an unlikely alliance of military, intelligence, and classified personnel  in an attempt to find and destroy the bioenhancer before it is released on an unsuspecting world.

The Manchild is a tense and ultimately inspiring story of debasement, renewal, and love, and an exciting look into a clandestine world of exotic technology and extraterrestrial contact.