My Newest Work in Progress!

Sadie Brooke is an eleven-year-old math genius trying to live a normal life. But ‘normal’ in 1920 is hard to come by. The Great War ended only two years before and the world is still coming to grips with the ramifications of that horrific conflict. And for Sadie, the world had already changed in 1917 when her mom died in an apartment fire across the Atlantic Ocean in England where she’d gone to help in the war effort. Can anything really be normal after that?

To distract herself from her fear that Mama left her and Pop because she couldn’t love them enough, Sadie spends her time working math problems and trying to convince her classmates and her father that math is beautiful in its symmetry and magical in its usefulness. She fails utterly, until Blair Bishop Bradford III joins their fifth grade class. Chip, as he likes to be called, is the son of a police detective, and encourages Sadie to use her math skills to help him help his dad solve some stubborn cases. Sadie discovers that using math to solve mysteries is exciting and even dangerous at times. She and Chip and their shy but imminently practical friend Danny make such successful detectives that the other kids, and even the police, ask for their help. But then Sadie discovers that her own mother was not who Sadie thought she was. Can they solve that mystery before an even greater danger overtakes them all?

Set against the backdrop of post-war New York City and the first years of the Roaring Twenties, the Sadie Stories is a series of five mysteries-- a collaboration between historical fiction writer Patricia Curtis Pfitsch and her high school math teacher husband, Jack Pfitsch. In each book Sadie, Chip, and Danny solve a mystery using math that twenty-first century fifth graders are learning in their present-day classrooms. And in each book the three friends get a little closer to understanding what really happened to Sadie’s mother.