Nancy Drew Clues

Did you gobble up all the Nancy Drew stories as a child? Did you have favorites you returned to again and again? Many of my friends did. I’ve always been a voracious reader, but for some reason that I’ll never remember, I never read the Nancy Drew books.

A couple of years ago, a crate of them landed in my possession. These had been stored at my mother-in-law’s home. My sisters-in-law agreed these were not the ones they had read as young girls. People had written their names inside the front cover of some of the books.  None of us recognized them. I kept the first one, The Mystery of the Old Clock, but handed off the others to my daughter-in-law who has an active eBay shop.

When the first four of Carolyn Keene’s stories came into the public domain this year, I realized the one I had kept was a first edition. A quick check with d-i-l proved what I suspected. She had listed the rest, and they had been quickly purchased. At this same time, I was working on Planted Promises, my soon-to-be-released third book in The Promised Destiny Series.

Planted Promises is a mystery from the very start! I thought, why not a nod to Nancy Drew? That’s exactly what I did. My main character jumped barefoot into the hole that used to be their front yard and was being transformed into a native garden. This 125-year-old home had been in their family since it was built in the 1890s. Sometime in a past generation, an ancestor had buried an old canning jar containing a key and a clue. What a perfect segue into the Nancy Drew-style hints!

I’ve read those first four books now. What amazed me most was all the freedom the 16-year-old girl, Nancy, had to go on all her mystery-solving adventures. A host of lively characters of all ages hopes to discover the treasure of the Planted Promises mystery.

I’ve pictured the one Nancy Drew book I kept from that crate and the four I borrowed from a family member. The four have newer covers and are not first editions, but they do have the original text. What was your favorite Nancy Drew book? I’d love to see your collection.

Planted Promises, the final volume in the series, is expected to be released in early December, with a pre-order link coming later this month. In the meantime, I hope you’ll check out the other books in The Promised Destiny Series.

Meet Lynn…

Lynn U. Watson is a devotional writer, occasional quilter, reflexologist, and great-great-granddaughter of a baron from Southwest Germany. Lynn combines her passions and her heritage Stepping Through Time Stitching Stories of Faith. Snippets of her family story inspire her fiction writing. She and her husband, Steve, make their home in Bartlett, TN, where Jasmine the resident feline considers herself Princess of the Palace.

Learn more at Lynn’s website or at her BRRC profile page…