Finally getting there!
A Seller's Market will be available for preorder in the next couple of weeks and will be released the same day as Weigh Anchor, the 26th book in the original Jesse McDermitt Caribbean Adventure Series.
Both will be available for preorder by the end of the month and will be released on November 1. In the meantime, here's the new cover.
This will be the first book in the Young Jesse McDermitt Tropical Adventure Series, where we get to know Jesse in his formative years. In this book, he's 17 and fresh out of boot camp with his new friend Jim Thurman, who has just picked up the nickname Rusty. We'll meet Frank and Norma McDermitt, Jesse's grandparents who raised him, and learn more about Bo and Helen McDermitt, Jesse's parents, and the circumstances of their deaths. We'll meet a younger Billy Rainwater and learn more about Jesse's connection to him and his father, and why Billy builds 4x4s. There's even a passing meeting with Tank Tankersley, though his name isn't mentioned. That's an Easter egg. I'm sure fans of the original series will have no trouble finding him.
In fact, this book is full of Easter eggs, as Jesse is learning many of the skills and sayings he uses in later life. I'm having such a blast writing this book--it practially writes itself--that it's almost half written already.
The idea for this new series came to me when I was talking to a youngish friend, an active duty Marine, who'd just returned from leave where he got married down in Florida. They honeymooned in Key West and he might or might not have gotten into a bit of trouble. Warning to all: Any conversation with me is fodder for fiction.
Anyway, I realized that during his twenty years in the Corps, Jesse would have had twenty 30-day leaves, and since I haven't written any flashbacks to those events in the current series, I had twenty possible books where Jesse would go on leave to some tropical location or another.
The series will be alphabetical, starting with A Seller's Market. The next one will be Blue Heaven in 2024, then Cocaine Cowboy later that year, and Deadly Gambit in 2025.
This isn't replacing the current series, but I think these books will give the current series more depth.
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