book synopses
Discover the plot of four novels and one children's mystery by author J. Stewart Willis in these book synopses.


Gestation Seven
Three government scientists go rogue and run an experiment designed to reduce the human race's gestation period. The experiment goes wrong and results in the murder of two babies.
A young woman reporter investigates the crime to help unravel the mystery of all that happened while the youngest of the three scientists, innocent of the murders, is embroiled in the turmoil that ensues.
The tragedy comes to the local congressman's attention and results in a congressional hearing to find out why government oversight failed during the events of the experiment and its aftermath.


Deadly Highway
What happens when ambitious and competitive people at a major tech company are involved in preparing a proposal for a lucrative contract that will ensure the company's future and its leaders for years to come?
Deadly Highway follows the in-fighting of these people and their wives as they prepare the proposal. The competition is cutthroat, involving adultery, blackmail, drugs, and death.
Deadly Highway delivers it all.


Three Degrees and Gone
In 2087, coastal flooding and extreme weather changes have turned the United States into a nation of migrants and tent cities. In this environment, three family groups struggle with their plights and their dreams for the future. They come together from different parts of the nation when they hire illegal traffickers to take them across Canada's border, where they will live as illegal immigrants.
The crossing is not an easy task because Canada has established a physical and electronic border wall. Low-flying drones and satellites regularly patrol. The traffickers take them to a crossing point in remote parts of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana from which they will attempt their crossing. In making the crossing, some are successful, and some are not, but even for those who succeed, life is not what they had hoped it to be.


One Vote
When the Democratic President-Elect, who has won the election with a mere 272 Electoral Votes, dies three days after the election, the election process is in turmoil. First, the Democratic Party must hold the Electors together, so they vote in unison. Next, a faithless elector refuses to vote for the Party choice, and two electors are paid off, probably by the existing President. The election process moves to the House of Representatives, which deadlocks under the Constitution's rules.
During the House's repeated failures to select a President, the Vice President-Elect gets sworn in. Simultaneously, the existing President refuses to leave the White House, saying he is the only elected President. Legally, in accordance with the Constitution, the new Vice President should serve as Acting President. Read about the Constitutional chaos and its eventual resolution.


Requiem for Geraldine Gerbil
An author of children's books is found shot to death inside the front door of her home. Detectives Metzinger and Givens get assigned to the case. They quickly learn that several people dislike and even hate the woman. Among these is a daughter who made up the stories the author has claimed as her own. As she grows older, this daughter wants credit. Because of the author's relationship with that daughter, she ignored her older daughter and was often abusive.
When the first daughter refuses to write more books, despite the author having been paid ahead of publication a commission for three books, the author's agent and publisher are left hanging. Further, the woman who has illustrated the earlier books is dismissed rudely and abusively by the author. The killer is eventually identified and tried, but did he do it?


The Johnson Place
The Johnson Place is a story of a tragic hunting accident, the kidnapping and abuse of a teenage girl, the murder of a wife, the trial and hanging of the husband, the opportunistic acquisition of land, a family conflict over inheritance, the loss of the last vestiges of a family land empire, and the dreams of many to establish a ski resort, all associated with three hundred acres of land.


Tent City Convoy
When the rising ocean, in the year 2086, engulfs the last vestiges of the Jamestown Visitors Center and drowns its manager, his wife, Magrethe Bernard takes her children away from the threatening sea and memories that haunt her and moves inland to temporarily live in a tent city of migrants. There, the source of her nightmares returns to threaten her. As the tent city moves south for the winter, she abandons the other migrants, but in a raging hurricane, the past finds her. In the turmoil that follows, nature intervenes to destroy her pursuer, and she finds love, hope, and redemption.