A lonely professor impregnates herself using the DNA from Shakespeare's pipe, also contracting malaria.  A colleague steals the pipe, sells it to a Dubai auction while malaria breaks out in her hometown, but more than anything she wants to give birth to a healthy baby.

SYNOPSIS:

Coverage by The Writers' Literary Publishing and Services Company.

Gabriella Foote, an English professor at a small Northern California college, travels to Stratford-on-Avon and finds an old pipe believed to have been Shakespeare's. Rob, biologist-friend, confirms the pipe's stem holds the immortal Bard's DNA. Gabby impregnates herself using the Bard's DNA.

Sylvia, an African colleague, coaxes the story out of Gabby, steals the real pipe and arranges a fabulous auction in Dubai, U.A.E., selling the pipe twice: as priceless heirloom and as activated DNA to the wives of billionaires who want genius children. Things darken when Gabby is mysteriously infected with the most virulent strain of malaria, plasmodium falciparum.

Rob accompanies Gabby from Seattle to London to Dar es Salaam in pursuit of the right vaccine. From a yellowed parchment in which the pipe was wrapped, Gabby learns that Shakespeare's "dark lady" was indeed dark, an African slave who bore him a child who died from malaria!

In Tanzania, Gabby and Rob finally get the vaccine and some news from a doctor who can trace his lineage back to African slaves shipped to England and sold to London slavers. His great, great grandmother had been romantically linked to Shakespeare. Gabby's interest quickens when she learns that his dirty little secret was selling his own daughter to a rich Indian family to pay for his medical education, ironically to eradicate malaria from Africa. His family name? Falcipa.

Gabby and Rob's flight home from Dar es Salaam is diverted to Dubai where they unexpectedly find themselves aboard a Lear jet with two Arabian women also pregnant with Shakespeare's progeny. The women confer, smiles disappear, the Lear jet alters course to London, headquarters of Talisman International.

Meanwhile there's a malarial outbreak in Gabby's college town. Who's responsible...or what? Gabby's plane lands, she's about to deliver her baby, but first has some unfinished business with Sylvia Falcipa.