I can still remember the excitement as the package arrived each month.

I’d come home from school to find a small brown cardboard mailer on the kitchen table. I’d rip it open and out would slide a book—another in the Happy Hollisters series of family-based mysteries.

While I still have all of the books I received packed in a box in our basement, I had not thought of them in quite some time—even though I would credit the series with instilling in me a love for reading that helped to launch my own writing career—until today.

That’s when our news-clipping service emailed an obituary to me. The obituary was of Helen Stroud Hamilton, a resident of Diakon’s Twining Village in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—and the illustrator of the Happy Hollisters books!