Fourteen-year-old Zach searches for belonging and acceptance in a small Kansas town. His father is a fanatical preacher, his mother is a social recluse, and his personality is oppressively introverted. At school he is ridiculed and one kid threatens to beat him up. After finally standing up for himself and fighting back a bit too hard, he must join forces with one of his former enemies to save the very bully who wanted to destroy him. Soon, he finds himself in desperate trouble as he tries to rescue his new friend and, with the help of a kind stranger, confronts the man who nearly murdered his father.

The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of the QIAGEN QIAamp® Stool Mini Kit against a standard phenolchloroform procedure for the extraction, quantitation, and STR-typing of human nuclear DNA from human feces. Stools from six subjects were sampled by swabbing and excision. Samples extracted with the QIAamp kit gave a wide range of DNA yields, whereas those extracted by the organic method yielded no DNA. DNA was not recovered from one subject's stools by either procedure. The QIAamp extracts were amplified with the Profiler PlusTM and COfilerTM kits, and PCR inhibition was observed with DNA extracts that were further concentrated. Substitution of water or TE-4 for the QIAamp elution buffer eliminated most, if not all, of the inhibition. A modified QIAamp procedure was used to extract thirty samples, which were subjected to one of five environmental conditions. DNA was recovered from all of these samples, and typing results were obtained on 93% of the samples.