On the threshold of his New York mansion, FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast finds the body of Alban - a dangerous sociopath with the gift of foresight, an elusive criminal and... his own son. His killer managed to escape, deliberately leaving the only evidence in the victim's stomach: a piece of very rare turquoise. Another dark secret of the Pendergast family requires clarification, and the agent begins an investigation. He finds out that such turquoise was mined in the only place in the world, goes to California and descends into an abandoned mine - straight into a trap... At the same time, one of the employees is found dead in the New York Museum of Natural Sciences, where strange and frightening cases have been happening for a long time. There is no motive, no accused, although the evidence is plentiful. An old acquaintance of the agent, Lieutenant D'Agosta, takes up the case, and gradually a mysterious connection is discovered between the two murders, and all the threads lead to Pendergast's great-great-grandfather, who created a certain panacea elixir... For the first time in Russian!