GENRE: HISTORICAL
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ANNALIESE FRY, M.D.JOHNNY FRY AND JINX - BOOK 3
by Skeet will
This is a character driven novel.
Johnny Fry is deeply in love with his wife and has to figure a way to fit his life into her’s. This is a story of how he does that. She is a newly graduated doctor who purchases the practice of a retiring doctor in the small California town of San Diego in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century. He had practiced there for forty years and asked her “will you take care of my people?” She does. His people were the Mexicans of San Diego. Accepting the idea that the most important things in his life were his wife’s patients took some doing but he manages it fairly well. Because he is willing to be the ‘tail on her kite,’ as he says, he is free to do things on his own, within reason of course, just so he always comes home. One of these things is a trip across the Sonoran Desert, still a wild and dangerous place in the early 1890’s. With his friends Wash, Wash’s wife, Woman, Handy, and Jinx, the cat, he leaves home on a two month long adventure that includes a couple scraps with Apaches, a man with a grudge and an injury that causes two days to disappear. While he’s gone his wife has to deal with a potential epidemic, the loss of a friend and regaining a friend she thought she’d lost. Finally she sends a telegram asking him to come home. This is the story of these two people, their friends and others who were important in the beginnings of a town, ‘in a desert between the mountains and the sea’. These friends include, George Washington Moore, Wash to his friends, a former low country slave from South Carolina, who joins Johnny and his friend, Handy, on a 1900 mile trip from Kansas to California Wash’s wife Woman, so named because she was the only woman in a gold camp in the California mountains. She still carries a big Bowie knife in a sheath behind her belt and uses it when she feels the need to. Lemuel Waters, who, after his wife died, built a large wagon and traveled the west selling books with his blind daughter, Greta. He ends up as Johnny’s partner in a San Francisco and then a San Diego bookstore. Annaliese relates to Greta as a surrogate daughter and helps her grow into a woman and a mother. Sarah Travers, who came west with her half Indian daughter and ran a wilderness store fifty miles from the nearest neighbor. She follows her children to San Francisco and in the process meets ….. Madame, A former gold rush bawdy house madame who became rich in her business, then married even richer. She and Sarah become friends and then more than friends. Madame also helps her friends from ‘the old days’ and uses her money to ‘help the city be what it can be.’ Kate Sessions, who finds flowers and trees from all over the world and brings them to San Diego to help make it one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And Handy Josephson, a Swedish farm boy who becomes a friend to last a lifetime. This story of these people and their lives is part of a saga that stretches across a continent during an exciting time in history. |
