Joe Belmont is a tough, smart, 1st-year medical student who puts in sixty-hour weeks as a waiter to support himself. Then without warning his saintly mother is murdered in her modest home, and his uncle, his only living relative, dies in a suspicious auto accident. Now, for no apparent reason, whoever killed them are trying to kill him.

From multiple hiding places within the Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up, to the Jersey shore hospital where he was placed at bedrest for 12 nightmarish months, to the financial district of Zurich, Switzerland, Joe and his brilliant girlfriend, Lara, run for their lives.

Lara, who's into all kinds of Freudian hocus pocus, thinks the answer is locked up deep in Joe's unconscious mind. Joe thinks that the more practical answer is to get a gun, learn how to shoot the frigging thing, and get the hell out of the City of Brotherly Love... But then what?