Dear reader. Time to mix yourself a Caipirinha and strap up. This shit will blow your mind.

January 1, 1970. La Ceja, Colombia. Pablo Escobar hands John Martin 380 kilos of pure cocaine and takes a briefcase of $3.8 million in cash. Then the Patrón gifts him a machete with the words para los problemas engraved on the blade.

That night, the Cessna's right engine catches fire over the Brazilian jungle. The parachute fails on the first pull. Opens on the second.

Martin recovers the cocaine from the wreckage just before the fuel tank erupts. A banana spider finds him unconscious. He splashes Jameson on the wound, falls down a ravine, and slides into grey quicksand.

A young tribeswoman named Anaiá lassoes him out.

Her people are called Os Ocultos. The Hidden Ones. The shaman drives a tapir bone needle through Martin's ribs into his heart. The mixture is called Kaluri. Most men die.

John Martin lives.

The tribe has a name for what runs in their veins under the full moon.

Goldblood.

Anaiá warns him to mask his scent and hide at three in the morning. Martin watches the tribe tear apart an Englishman with their teeth and drink him to the bone.

And inside their mountain sleeps a fortune in gold the world doesn't know about.

By the end of the year, John Martin returns with soldiers. He drags Anaiá's father from his bed. He kills him in front of her. He kills her mother. He kills her people. He takes the mountain. And the one beside it.

The cocaine, it turns out, is the smaller fortune.

At the Café Martinique in Nassau, Elizabeth Taylor, in lavender silk, throws her drink in Richard Burton's face. Burton tells Martin he's rich as a bitch. Sophia Loren takes his arm for the rhumba. Roger Moore leaves with Luisa Mattioli. Ursula Andress kisses Burton's forehead.

Hemingway smiles down from a framed photograph in his Key West villa. Jim Morrison stares from another.

Then Diahann Carroll takes him by yacht to a forgotten island. Down into an underground kitchen where Mahalo plays Bitches Brew on a Gibson Hummingbird. Mama Rena, a CIA fortune teller, deals him a deck he has never seen before. She tells him a number.

317.

She tells him his reality is not real. She tells him he has been here before.

Then comes Pastor Babas. A voodoo priest in a red robe embroidered with eagles. A glass of wine drugged with a fungus that enslaves an entire town. He has been waiting for John Martin for a very long time.

What follows is three hundred kilometers of the Amazon by canoe. Past alligators with eyes like rusted gates. Into a tunnel where a spider the size of a Volkswagen corners Martin and his driver, Hailson. Through a Quilombola settlement that may or may not still be human.

And the priest is the smaller demon. The bigger one is waiting in a Mind Room beneath a Greek lighthouse, and it has been there since ancient Egypt.

And in his mother's last letter, hidden under a stone in an Oslo garden, John Martin learns the truth about who he really is — and where his bloodline leads.

Real history is the cover story.

Pablo Escobar. Roger Reaves. Richard Burton. Elizabeth Taylor. Sophia Loren. Roger Moore. Ursula Andress. Peter O'Toole. Diahann Carroll. Ernest Hemingway. Jim Morrison. Miles Davis. Howlin' Wolf.

Written in the muscular tradition of Wilbur Smith, Ian Fleming, and Robert Anton Wilson — and pushed past the line where any of them ever dared go.

For readers of The Power of the Dog, Where Eagles Dare, and The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Book 3 of The Feeder Series. The chronological second act of the Martin dynasty saga.

Power. Blood. Desire. The deep state isn't a theory. It's a bloodline.