Keeping Up With Annette
Today Earth Star came out with the latest Annette Vetter mystery, Spring Break at the Lake House by Ann Carol Ulrich, the seventh in the 1960s Young Adult series. The ebook is already live on Amazon Kindle, and within the next couple of days Amazon will be selling the print version, which is already available from Create Space.
The first four novels in the series were written when I was much younger, such as 40 or more years ago ... but with In the Shadow of the Tower, which I wrote while living in Forks, Washington two and one half years ago, the story line advanced quickly to the next phase in 15-year-old Annette's life. She discovers she has a half-brother, Terry, and Terry has a younger sister named Ruby, who has suffered some trauma in a foster home before running away to Wisconsin with her older brother. It is Christmastime in Wisconsin and Terry almost misses his chance to be part of his true family.
The following year (2016), I wrote The Ground Hog Mystery, which is a continuation of In the Shadow of the Tower, in which Terry and Ruby have joined Annette and her mother on their ten-acre farm outside Ravensville, Wisconsin. It introduces Bob Foley, who wakes up in a jungle hospital in Vietnam, unable to remember his identity and not expected to live. Yet the young Vietnamese nurse helps him recover, and the sympathetic doctor knows of a man he can trust to help Bob escape the Viet Cong. Ruby misses her dad and dreams about him, while Annette is busy rounding up livestock rustlers and gathering up the nerve to ask Tim Duncan, Penny's older brother, to the Valentines Dance.
Exactly a year later (2017), Spring Break at the Lake House emerged from my pen and keyboard. Now we have Ruby's father, Bob Foley, back in the USA after being "missing in action" during the Vietnam conflict in 1968 and 1969. Bob has come home to Colorado Springs, damaged after his ordeal, and devastated to learn that his wife Ruth committed suicide and that the two teenagers went to Wisconsin, possibly living with their Uncle Will. He soon discovers they live with Terry's half sister (Annette) and her widowed mother in Ravensville ... so he arrives at the farmhouse on Easter morning, but nobody's home ... only Tim, the neighbor boy taking care of Annette's cows, who tells Bob they all went to the lake house in Minocqua ... but he doesn't know their relative's last name, nor does he have any contact information for Bob, who jumps back into his beater car and drives up to Minocqua.
Lots of intrigue and subplots make these latest three Annette Vetter adventures my favorites. They are aimed at the Young Adult reader, but anyone will enjoy reading them, and particularly if you grew up in the Sixties like I did, and want to time travel back to an era that had no cell phones or computers, not even answering machines ... when life was simpler and less hectic than it is now. It's an exciting vacation to Jackson County, Wisconsin and beyond ... with people you'll come to love.
I expect the next Annette Vetter novel is on the horizon as we get closer to 2018. I can't wait to find out what happens next, and what other trouble the girls will get into during the month of May 1969, with prom, graduation around the corner, and Penny getting her driver's license! Oh, dear ...
All of the Annette Vetter books are available in print ($9.95 each) or on Amazon Kindle as eBooks. If you'd like to order the whole set of seven ... there's a huge discount. Email me personally!
