Down south in Northern Georgia, Adeline Augusta Frothmeyer, under her preferred pen name of Addie August is writing mysteries and wants to become the youngest mystery bestseller of her time. As she begins her freshman year at Cotton Academy, she is caught up in a real life mystery. Someone is sending mysterious messages to Ana, the new student in town. The notes direct the student to contact Addie for assistance in finding her long lost brother. Ana was adopted into on family at an early age, and her older brother was adopted into a different family.
Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Addie has met Vince Dalton, star football player and editor of the school newspaper. She juggles her crush on him while dealing with her beautiful older sister Cammie, a junior, who now seems to want nothing to do with Addie since entering high school. She enters a mystery writing contest while trying to solve the mystery around her with her best friend Allie. Her schedule is full of homework and occasional shopping trips with her friends. Can she solve the mystery before Ana decides to move back to Florida?
Welcome to Addie’s sleuthing world in Benville, Georgia, where small time charm and the ability to know who you are and what you can do meet. Cotton Academy is a place where the young men come bearing football mums before pep rallies. The school is a mixture of day students and boarding students and a mix of old Southern tradition combined with the new technological world. Cotton Academy is over one hundred years old and has secrets as puzzling as the many corridors in the old Greek Revival buildings that line its campus.
Can she solve the mystery before Ana decides to move back to Florida? Why has someone deliberately involved Addie in these strange circumstances? Is Ana’s long lost brother in the Benville community? How is Miss Emily Cotton, headmistress of the school, involved? Addie begins to figure out the pieces and rushes against time before her chance to reunite sister and brother is lost forever.
This is the first book in the Addie August, Teenage Mystery Writer Series. The quest for knowledge and the desire to do the right thing will keep readers guessing until the last page. Addie tells part of the story in her own words through the pages of her journal named Jo.