If you read the last blog entry, you know I'm giving a bit of history of my publishing career. I decided not to go strictly chronologically, because when I wrote the stories is often different from when they were published. What feels like the correct order for me doesn't line up with dates you'll see for each book.

Her Ex-GI P.I. was fun to write, because I took my husband's stories of Vietnam and wove them into a '60s murder mystery. Carrie is a '60s woman of twenty who's unwilling to settle for her mother's view of how her life should go but unable to cut loose and burn her bra. After she finds a dying man in an alley, she meets Jack, who recently returned from Vietnam both physically and emotionally traumatized.

While my husband contributed the stories that serve as background for Jack's time in "the Nam," I based the character himself on a man I went to university with. He was determined that his significant injury would not prevent him from being useful to the world. I saw the struggles he faced daily to see himself not as a cripple, but as a future teacher, an informed citizen, and a loving husband. We lost track of each other after graduation, but I hope he did well.

Carrie is me, I think, with her naivete and her desire to be useful to the world. (Thankfully, my mother was not a "find a man and get married type," as hers was.) Many of the attitudes Carrie faces in the book mirror what a lot of women faced back then. People were confused when we wanted to make our own decisions, and there was lots of well-meant advice like, "You should talk to your father (or your pastor or your uncle or whoever) before you decide."

The setting for Her Ex-GI P.I. is Flint, Michigan, which was populated in those days with people who'd moved there to work in the "shops," where Chevrolet, Buick, A/C, and others paid good wages for unskilled labor. Many "shop rats" were from southern states, but plenty of people from my home area, northern Michigan, moved "down below" and lived there through their working years before retiring back "up north." There's ice hockey, of course, with the Flint Generals. And the climactic end of the story occurs in a snowstorm. Quite fitting for the Mitten State.

Her Ex-GI P.I. is available here for $2.99