First Born

Crammed with sci-fi effects, this is an imaginative but rather sophomoric debut thriller by a Long Island ex-psychiatric counselor turned journalist interested in paranormal phenomena and alien abduction. As the story begins, power-grasping Neo Tech, a super-secret arm of the National Security Agency that utilizes ESP for international espionage, calls in its most sensitive ""remote viewer,"" lovely young Casey Lee Armstrong, to examine a small, otherworldly artifact taken from the uterus of a young Mexican ""virgin"" in 1994, during the C-section delivery of her son. (Shortly after the birth, both mother and baby were killed in a fatal hit-and-run accident.) The results of Casey's psychic probe are a set of map coordinates that point to Colorado Springs and a middle-aged woman who had a UFO encounter in Mexico City during the solar eclipse of 1991. Now, nine years later, just past the stroke of midnight of the old millennium, the woman gives birth to a strange baby--extraterrestrial, devil or messiah, it's unclear--and an identical artifact is removed from her uterus. The Neo Tech bad guys erase Casey's memory of her seance and head to Colorado, scheming to kidnap the baby. However, the telepathic link between psychic Casey and the mystical new life force overpowers her artificial amnesia and she is drawn to the coordinates. Set up as a patsy for the murder of a priest, Casey tries desperately to enlist the aid of a cop who has been cured of fatal ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) through contact with the baby. Fanciful plotting and fast action only partially compensate for Sears's corny premise and untutored prose, with its scattergun POV. (Jan.)