I was born in August 1960, the eldest son of an outboard motor mechanic and a registered nurse. We moved around a lot (started in Indiana, moved to Pennsylvania, back to Indiana, on to Michigan, back to Indiana, a short and ultimately pointless move within Indiana before moving to Arizona—all before I turned eighteen) and had supportive parents that tried to stimulate our intelligence. Museums, concerts on TV, antique machinery shows and the like. I developed an appreciation for classic cars and motorcycles, as well as aircraft and firearms to a lesser extent. Though I didn’t graduate from there, I consider East Noble High School in Kendallville, Indiana to be my home school. Hence the blue-and-gold color scheme of this website. Go Knights! A gigantic blizzard paralyzed the eastern third of the United States in January 1978; because of that, our family moved to Coolidge, Arizona that June. That’s why I didn’t graduate with my classmates in the class of 1979. I met the unobtainable girl of my dreams at RCMS and East Noble (she knows who she is) and I feel a kinship to that school to this day.

I was getting ready to start my senior year at the high school in Coolidge just after I turned eighteen. But the principal said my grades were “equivalent to being halfway through your sophomore year.” Since I was going to be a senior, I decided not to enroll. I got my GED instead and started taking classes part time at Central Arizona College, where Mom had just gotten a job as the Campus Nurse. I literally quit high school so I could go to college. Our on-campus apartment was in the women’s dormitory village and that worked out nicely for this happily unrepentant girlwatcher!

In November 1981, I lucked into an unpaid internship with the electronic news gathering (ENG) department of KTVK-TV 3, the ABC-TV affiliate at the time in Phoenix. I got to meet most of the Phoenix Suns basketball team and shook hands with Bruce Babbitt, at the time governor of Arizona and later Secretary of the Interior during the Clinton Administration. After that I studied journalism at CAC. Click here to visit CAC’s website.

We returned to Indiana in March 1985. I didn’t want to leave Arizona but had no choice; it is my hope to relocate back to the Casa Grande area in the near future. Anyway, I married Nancy, the sister of my best buddy back then, met during our brief and pointless move to Albion, Indiana in late 1976. She graduated from Central Noble High School with the class of 1983. We were married on June 9, 1985, separated on December 22, 2005, and the divorce was finalized on January 30, 2007. We were married for twenty-one years, eight months and twenty-one days and we parted company as friends. We have two children, Jennifer and John III. Jennifer gave us our first grandchild on April 22, 2006; Nancy and I were in the delivery room when Corey was born.

I started writing fiction on a hobbyist basis in 1993, after my mother gave me an even-then ancient Amstrad PC-1212-DD personal computer. The first 90 pages of the computer file that eventually became The Path of Healing took up no less than eleven of those primitive 5 ¼” floppy disks. An equipment upgrade in 1996 allowed all the disks to be combined under one filename. Same with my other titles in-progress at the time. We upgraded two more times since then; I currently use a Compaq Presario running Windows XP software.

Sadly, my mother Shirley Adams passed away before any of the books she urged me to write were published. She died on Sunday, July 11, 1999 at age 62. My father John Adams is 71 and retired; he proofreads my manuscripts for me, enjoying the fruits of the tree his wife and my mother planted before her passing.

To date, I have written nine fiction novels. All are fully and professionally edited and haunt my hard drive until it’s their turn to be submitted to a publisher. I have two in-progress manuscripts and concepts in mind for three more. A literary agent in New York City is shopping my Two Roads to Reunion manuscript to major publishers, but has had no luck so far. Scroll further down to take a look at my currently available titles.

Acts of Kindness


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ISBN 978-0-595-44432-8 (Softcover)

ISBM 978-0-595-88759-0 (E-book)

To access the publisher’s website, click here. Click 'Bookstore' and enter the book title or author's name into the Search feature.

The Guilty Ones


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ISBN 1-4137-8403-8

This is my third book written and my third book published.

Synopsis:
Ford vs. Chevy. Chevy vs. Ford. The debate is as old as the two auto brand names themselves. For nineteen-year-old college student Skip Adair, however, the debate had no point or purpose; he was a steadfastly dedicated Ford guy. So one can imagine his disdain at being named the Student Director of an auto shop class charged with rebuilding the badly overheated small-block Chevy engine in one of his college’s fleet cars. Naturally, he respectfully declines the job. But his disdain turns into outright horror when his professor orders him to do the job anyway, blackmailing him with a failing grade and thus possibly endangering his overall grade point average. So Skip agrees to do the job, but with a secret and hilarious twist. He’ll turn the mild-mannered 1975 Chevy Malibu station wagon into a high performance, tire-shredding street screamer… all on the college’s dime and without the instructor’s knowledge!

Told in the first person as well as being technically and historically accurate, The Guilty Ones will amuse and delight any automotive enthusiast worth his lug nuts, despite his automotive allegiances.

To access the publisher’s website, click here.

The Widower


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ISBN 1-4137-6223-9

This is my second book published, but my fifth book written.

Synopsis:
Forty-two year-old Jake Ambrose is a man destroyed. He lost his lovely wife of twenty years in a head-on collision, just fifteen minutes after completing a four-wheel driveway rebuild of her minivan’s brakes. Though the brake job didn’t contribute to the accident, Mary’s idiot brother falsely charges Jake with murder, hoping to latch onto her estate. Though he is acquitted, Jake is shunned by his two teenagers and professional colleagues. So he decides to relocate from his hometown of Dayton, Ohio to Phoenix, Arizona to restart his life.

There he meets the beautiful red-haired Melissa Saunders. Even though they have a fifteen-year difference in their ages, each is attracted to the other right from the start. She reminds Jake of his departed wife, just as he reminds Melissa of her departed father. But Melissa harbors a dark secret of her own, one that involves how a teddy bear tattoo came to be on her outer right ankle. Can two wounded souls find peace and solace together? Can either of them learn to love again? Can Jake reconcile with his two estranged teenagers? These answers and more can be found within the pages of The Widower.

Click here to access the publisher’s website, then enter the title into the Search feature

The Path of Healing


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ISBN 1-4140-6631-7

This was my first book written and my first book published.

Synopsis:
Beautiful Anne Archer, 16, is infatuated with the new guy that has moved to town and now attends her high school. He’s smart, classy, witty, and drives a weird yet cool 1960 Lincoln Premiere. Yet Skip seems to be holding her at arm’s length, not allowing her to get to know him better. Anne does some discreet yet nosy probing and eventually discovers Skip’s dark secret: he got his girlfriend Teresa pregnant at his previous school, and rejected his responsibility to her out of fear. Then she committed suicide by jumping into the dam at nearby Bicksler Lake.

Through loving and gentle patience, Anne helps Skip past the pain and guilt of his horrible loss. Then, just as it seems he’s ready to let his past go, Anne stumbles on some stunning information… Teresa didn’t commit suicide.

She was murdered.

Now Anne must help Skip heal all over again, all the while keeping herself out of the determined clutches of Teresa’s killer.

Click here to access the publisher’s website, then enter the title into the Search feature.

Two Roads to Reunion

Roger knows what being neglected, hungry and abused feels like, while such things are utterly alien to John. John knows how great it is to have two loving at-home parents that indulge his growing intelligence, while such a thing is utterly alien to Roger. Both boys are wary of each other, each for their own reasons.

The two boys grow toward manhood together; Roger is secretly jealous of John’s upbringing, loving parents and secure childhood. He does his best to exact revenge on John for enjoying something that Roger will never know. John endures Roger’s increasingly vicious torment, relying on his faith, his parents and his beautiful and supportive girlfriend Diane to help him muddle through. But this just stiffens Roger’s resolve to make John’s life miserable.
Finally, in 1976, Roger steals the Adler’s car and is sentenced to jail. He and John will be reunited again in 1996, twenty years later, their life situations vastly different from each other as the two birthday twins travel their Two Roads to Reunion.

Around The Circle Again

© 2005 John W. Adams Jr. All rights reserved.