Plot Generator for stories and books

The Ward at Holloway Hill

Old Wenna Marsh wants her bees and her quiet. The queen she once tutored rides up the hill anyway: the great ward Wenna cast forty years ago, the one that ended the war with the river clans, is failing, and only its maker can renew it. The trouble is that Wenna never cast a ward. She forged a treaty, called it magic, and both sides have believed her ever since.

Collection Plate

Leon Achebe, an Atlanta private investigator who mostly catches cheating spouses, is hired by a church deacon to find out who is skimming the Sunday collection. The thief is easy to find: the pastor's son. The hard part starts when the son turns up dead two days later, and the deacon who hired Leon has an alibi only Leon is in a position to break.

Sent by Wire

Denver, 1882. Telegraph operator Clara Vance reads every message that passes through her key, which is how she learns the new silver mine owner is wiring lies to his investors back East. Before she decides what to do, he asks her to teach him Morse so he can stop trusting clerks with his secrets. Her job, his fortune and a town's payroll ride on one confession tapped out after midnight.

Winter Road

Gus Lindqvist has hauled fuel over frozen lakes in northern Manitoba for thirty years and has never seen footprints that far from shore. This February there are hundreds, bare feet, leading from a fishing shack nobody owns toward the town where his ex-wife lives. His radio picks up drivers who went through the ice decades ago. Each night the prints end a little closer to land.

The Rubber Ledger

Singapore, February 1942, days after the British surrender. Lim Siew Har keeps the books for a rubber firm the Japanese have just seized, and she wants one thing: to keep her father, a known donor to the China relief fund, off the Sook Ching screening lists. A clerk offers to lose his name in exchange for doctored accounts. The man those accounts will ruin is her fiancé's employer.

Dock Clock

Freighter pilot Juno Abara lives eight months for every eleven years that pass on Earth, and she has built her life around landing for the big days. She makes it home for her son's wedding to find him forty-three, running the company that owns her ship, and scheduling her final run. He has his reasons. The cargo she has hauled for three decades was never ore.