Chelios faces a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working.

A high school slacker who's rejected by every school he applies to opts to create his own institution of higher learning, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, on a rundown piece of property near his hometown.

Dr. Temperance Brennan and her colleagues at the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab assist Special Agent Seeley Booth with murder investigations when the remains are so badly decomposed, burned or destroyed that the standard identification methods are useless.