Booksense

First-time author Susan Runholt delivers a crackingly good mystery, complete with smart and savvy heroines (Kari and Lucas -- yes, Lucas), a long-lost Rembrandt painting (or is it?), and enough wonderful background info on great art and art-museum cities to fill a guidebook. I couldn't put it down!

—Barb Bassett, The Red Balloon Bookshop, Saint Paul, MN

The following title will be a starred review in Booklist's May 1 Mystery Showcase and in Book Links' July issue.

The Mystery of the Third Lucretia.  Runholt, Susan (Viking 9780670062522).

While visiting a Minneapolis art museum, 14-year-old best friends Kari and Lucas are reprimanded by an artist copying a Rembrandt painting. Then, while visiting London with Kari’s journalist mother, the girls see the same man, recognizable despite a disguise, copying another Rembrandt. When international reports herald the discovery of a previously unknown Rembrandt painting, Kari and Lucas, both talented artists themselves, recognize the work of the “Gallery Guy.” Their suspicions lead them to Amsterdam , where, along with Kari’s mother, they uncover an international forgery scam that implicates a top Dutch curator. Like Blue Balliet’s Chasing Vermeer (2004), Runholt’s debut is a clever, well-structured mystery that seamlessly folds art history into its exciting premise. The forged painting tells the ancient Roman story of Lucretia, signaling a theme of women’s rights that Runholt carries throughout the book, from the girls’ innocent questions about Amsterdam ’s Red Light district to the strong female characters who drive the story. The pacing occasionally lags, but by the story’s end, Runholt skillfully pulls in what seemed to be peripheral narrative tangents. Kari’s authentic narration, her strong realistic friendship with Lucas, the cosmopolitan settings, and the carefully plotted mystery combine in a winning read that ends with the suggestion of continued adventures.

*Please note that these reviews are unedited. The final text will appear in the issue noted above.

Kliatt

RUNHOLT, Susan. The mystery of the third Lucretia. Penguin, Viking. 278p. c2008. 978-0-670-06252-2. $16.99. J *

An exciting mystery, featuring two smart 9th-grade girls and their travel to Paris, Amsterdam, and London. Lucretia is the Roman wife Rembrandt and other painters featured in their art. Two famous paintings by Rembrandt are of Lucretia, and the third Lucretia of the title is in fact a forgery. Kari and Lucas (a girl) are given the chance to follow Kari's mother as she travels as a reporter/editor for The Scene, which covers European fashions. But their mystery starts right at home, at the Art Institute of Minneapolis. Both girls are artists themselves, and are gifted, to say the least. They notice a man they call Gallery Guy copying one of the two Lucretias; nothing wrong with that, except this fellow is especially secretive. As the girls travel to Europe, they see this same Gallery Guy in London and Lucas is nearly run down by a speeding car. The girls unfortunately have to tell a pack of lies to Kari's mother in order to get the freedom to investigate their suspicions. When they get word that a third Lucretia has been discovered in Amsterdam, they are almost certain this is a forgery, somehow related to Gallery Guy. They then tell Kari's mother and get her help as they change their plans and go to Amsterdam to see this third Lucretia for themselves. Kari's mother is kidnapped and the girls have to do all kinds of brave things before this story is finished. By the way, it looks like we will see more mysteries featuring Karl and Lucas. Lots of action, authentic emotions, friendship strains, mother-daughter conflicts ... Runholt gets it all just right in this novel. Claire Rosser, KLIATT

J--Recommended for junior high school students. The contents are of particular interest to young adolescents and their teachers.

*--The asterisk highlights exceptional books.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Kliatt
This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. For permission to reuse this article, contact Copyright Clearance Center.

Armchair Interviews

Reviewed by Andrea Sisco

Do you remember Judy Bolton? Perhaps you remember Trixie Belden? No? You would if you grew up in the 'olden days.' Well then, how about Nancy Drew? Even young girls recognize Nancy's name.

If you've read every Nancy Drew ever written and longed for more excitement in solving mysteries by a young person, you HAVE to read Susan Runholt's The Mystery of the Third Lucretia. I want to call her book the Nancy Drew of the twenty-first century, but somehow that doesn't seem to do Runholt's novel justice. It's in a league all of its own because it's not just a mystery. It's an exciting travel lesson and an art class-and the heroines have VALUES that surface regularly but do not slap you in the face with them.

Kari Sundgren and Lucas Stickney are fourteen. They are from St. Paul, Minnesota, love art and are best friends. Kari's mother's job takes her all over the world and Kari and Lucas get to accompany her occasionally. The girls love to travel so it's a perfect set up. Kari needs a guardian while her mother is gone and Lucas escapes her dysfunctional family.

Kari and Lucas spend a day at the Minneapolis Institute of Art where they encounter a crabby man painting in the room where the famous painting of Lucretia is hung. Indelibly embedded in their minds is his secretiveness and anger as he snarls "Go Away" when they try to see his work. A year later, they see the same man in London. He looks different, but his voice and the words, "Go Away" are the same.

The girls put together some clues, and with their intelligence, artistic talent and gutsy determination, they decide to solve the mystery of the Gallery Guy using a few things like disguises, fake accents and the little 'ole snake they use for diversion. What begins as an exciting 'game' while traveling becomes a dangerous mission. It could be deadly if the adults in charge don't believe two 'kids.'

I hope that this is just the first in a long series of Kari and Lucas adventures.

Armchair Interviews says: The Mystery of the Third Lucretia is a must read.

Kirkus Reviews

Mystery fans will enjoy this clever, engaging story of two girlfriends drawn into a dangerous puzzle involving international art fraud and murder. The adventure begins when ninth-graders Kari and Lucas visit the Minneapolis Art Institute to see an exhibit of Rembrandt’s Lucretia paintings and notice a creepy man they christen “Gallery Guy” copying the paintings. The plot thickens when Kari and Lucas accompany Lucas’s mom to London, where they spot the same man copying another Rembrandt Lucretia in the National Gallery. Kari convinces the skeptical Lucas that it’s more than coincidence and they start to investigate, realizing his scheme when they read news of the discovery in Amsterdam of a “lost” Rembrandt painting—a third Lucretia.

Runholt subtly interjects fascinating art-history facts throughout the story without sacrificing suspense. Kari and Lucas are appealing young sleuths; Kari’s intuitive approach is a good complement to Lucas’s photographic memory and analytical mind. Readers will no doubt look forward to reading more adventures of these teen detectives. (Fiction. 11-15)  

Over My Dead Body

Ninth graders Kari Sundgren and her best friend Lucas Stickney just want to enjoy a day at the art gallery, but somehow they become involved with an international art crime. Kari begins the story, as her English teacher taught her, at the very beginning -- 6th century BCE Italy. A lady named Lucretia was married to a Roman soldier. While he was away, she was raped by a powerful man after she scorned his advances. Back then when that happened, women felt dishonored, as though they had done something wrong. Lucretia took her own life. Moving right along to the 16th century, a painter named Rembrandt, enthralled with her story, painted two portraits of Lucretia that are now worth millions of dollars. And that is why, says Kari, everything else happened.

The girls met in an art class when they were ten. Kari’s dad is an artist, and she thought she had talent, until she saw Lucas’s work. The girl was a genius! Lucas, who is a girl whose father wanted a boy, comes from what some would call a privileged background, but she might disagree. Her father is a mean-spirited lawyer, her mother a spoiled, self-absorbed Southern belle. At least her grandmother, a strong-willed activist, does love and support her, but she feels more at home in the modest abode Kari shares with her single mother.

When Kari’s mom lands a job with a popular teen magazine that requires her to travel to Europe, the girls are thrilled. Their first trip comes soon after that fateful day when they visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see the two Lucretias, owned by different museums, exhibited together for the first time. They observe an odd, secretive gray-haired man copying one of the paintings. They name his The Gallery Guy, and promptly forget him, until he crosses their path again in the National Gallery in London. The girls are sure he’s up to something illegal, and they combine their talents to find out what it is. They make a good team: Lucas has a photographic memory and an analytic brain, and Kari is creative, and daring. Their investigation takes them to other European cities, including the red light district of Amsterdam, a side trip Kari’s mom does not at all approve of, and which almost proves fatal.

This is a great book for young readers. The characters are likable, quirky and funny. Kari provides bits of interesting history and art lore along the way, and there is plenty of detail about the cities and cultural aspects of the places they visit.

Penguin Putnam reviews in School Library Journal –

March, 2008

RUNHOLT, Susan. The Mystery of the Third Lucretia. 244p. Viking. Apr. 2008. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-0-670-06252-2. LC number unavailable.

Gr 4-7–At the opening of this art mystery reminiscent of Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer (Scholastic, 2004), teen art enthusiasts Kari and Lucas encounter a foul-tempered man painting secretively at an exhibit of Rembrandt’s famous Lucretia at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The strange episode proves significant when the best friends embark on a trip to London with Kari’s mother and bump into the same unsociable painter in the Rembrandt room of the National Gallery. They realize the man is more than what he seems and make it their mission to discover what he is painting with such intense secrecy. Disguise and hilarity ensue, but before they know it, Kari and Lucas find themselves in real danger. The situation spirals when a new Lucretia painting surfaces unexpectedly, and the two sleuths must piece together the clues before the painter catches up with them–or before Kari’s mom discovers that they have been spending their sightseeing time spying on a criminal. Kari narrates in a believable, contemporary voice, straightforward and humorous, reflecting the foibles and fears of an average 14-year-old. The story is carried by its continuous action and likable characters... The clarity of the plot, as well as the relative lack of violence, makes this a worthwhile choice for readers newly acquiring a taste for the mystery genre. –Emma Runyan, The Winsor School , Boston , MA

Core audience: girls 11-14
Notable for plot, art appreciation

The suspense doesn't let up. Foreshadowing at the ends of most chapters keeps the pages turning. These two modern sleuths, dutiful to Mom, but very gutsy, are forces to be reckoned with. Readers will wonder what they get into next! Fans of all these wonderful new art-centered mysteries will savor this one.

ART, TRAVEL, KARI AND LUCAS

All the Kari and Lucas books are going to have something to do with art, and something to do with travel. One of the things I want to do with these books is to let readers see that there's nothing snooty about art. Regular kids can like all kinds of art—paintings like the ones by Rembrandt, sculptures like the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum, and other kinds of art as well. And I want to show kids that there's a big world out there, and I want them to want to explore it and have adventures in it.

So the first book, The Mystery of the Third Lucretia, is about Rembrandt's work and takes place in London, Paris and Amsterdam. The second book, Rescuing Seneca Crane, is about how Kari and Lucas find and rescue a fifteen-year-old concert pianist who was kidnapped after playing a concert with an orchestra at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. The third book, which for now is called The Safari Adventure (the name might change), is about Kari and Lucas tracking down the person who's stealing rock art from some caves in Kenya.

REMBRANDT'S PAINTINGS OF LUCRETIA

Lucretia was this woman who supposedly lived in the sixth century B.C.E. This was, like, when they used to have gladiators. She was married to a Roman soldier who was always bragging about what a wonderful, good, pure, loving woman his wife was.

When he was off fighting some war, a soldier named Sextus Tarquinius, one of his rivals, sneaked back to Rome and flirted with Lucretia to try to get her to have an affair with him. She wouldn't, so he raped her.

Now back in those days it wasn't bad enough that a woman had that kind of thing happen to her. What made it even worse was that it totally wrecked her reputation. A lot of women who got attacked like that would have been kicked out of their house. It was the kind of thing that makes my mother go on and on about what a rotten deal women have always gotten. I have to admit, it does seem pretty unfair.

Anyway, Lucretia was a truly good person. So she called her husband and her father back from the war and told them about what had happened to her. They said it wasn't her fault and it wasn't that big of a deal. But because it was so dishonorable, she picked up a dagger and killed herself. Can you believe that? Even though she didn't do anything wrong!

By the way, I'm not making this up. This may not be absolutely true, but it's a real legend. Google it.

Rembrandt's part of the story happened in Amsterdam way back in the 1600s. You probably know this, but Amsterdam is a city in the Netherlands (also called Holland), which is in Europe. The people who live there are called Dutch, which doesn't seem to make much sense, but that's the way it is. The Netherlands is the place where they have windmills, and where people used to wear wooden shoes. Anyway, Rembrandt van Rijn was a painter living in Amsterdam way back then. Nowadays most people just call him Rembrandt. You've maybe heard of him, and you might even have seen some of his paintings if you go to museums.

Rembrandt painted two pictures of Lucretia. In one, she's all dressed up in a beautiful white and gold gown, and she's holding a dagger like she's getting ready to stab herself. That one hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the other picture she's already stabbed herself, her dress is hanging loose, and there's blood coming out of her side. That one belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

A lot of people, when they look at a painting like this, think about how much money the painting cost, or what makes it look like other paintings by Rembrandt, or how it's different from pictures by other Dutch painters from that time, or how Rembrandt used paint and brushes to do what he did.

But I'll bet if Rembrandt were still alive, he wouldn't want you to think about any of that when you see his Lucretia paintings. What he'd want you to look at is Lucretia's expression. It is so sad. That's what's important. It's what Rembrandt wanted you to see and feel, and it's what makes these pictures masterpieces.

So when you go to museums, remember just to look at what's in the picture, what the painter was trying to do and to tell you. None of the rest really matters.

Lucretia, 1668
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn
Minneapolis Institute of Art

KARI ANDREA SUNDGREN

My name. One of the things people always ask me about when they read books about Lucas and me is how I pronounce my name. So I'll tell you. I was named after my father's great-grandmother, another Kari Sundgren, who was Swedish, so the first part of my first name sounds like the word car. Kari is pronounced like CAR-ee. The rest of it is pronounced like you'd think. And if you're wondering why my middle name is spelled that way, it's because my parents named me Andrea after Andrew, my grandfather on my mother's side.

How old I am, and what I look like. If you've read The Mystery of the Third Lucretia, you already know a ton about me. I'm fourteen, I have dark hair that's kind of naturally curly—it's a problem, with all the hairstyles being so straight these days—and I wear it about down to my shoulders. I have hazel eyes. I'm about average height for my age, which is weird because both my parents are tall.

School. I go to public school, and I'm in ninth grade. I get pretty good grades. I do really well in English and social studies and that kind of thing. Math is a little bit harder for me, but I can get it if I really work at it. Art is my favorite subject, but we only have that once a week. Next to art I like English, especially creative writing. In my school they teach Italian, which Mom says is pretty weird for high schools, and I really like my Italian class, which I just started this year.

Where I live, and my parents and things. I was born at a very early age (ha ha) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My parents have been divorced since I was three. My mom and I live upstairs in a duplex in Saint Paul. My dad, who's an artist, lives on a houseboat in a little town on the Mississippi River. I usually go stay with him a few weekends during the school year and for a week during the summer.

Intuition. Both my mom and I have a really strong intuition. Lots of times I know things without knowing why or how I know them. Not school stuff of course, but about situations, and especially about people and what they're like. Sometimes I have a feeling something is going to happen before it does, or I know something I have to do, even if I don’t know exactly why. It's not always strong, and it's not always right. But it's good enough that by now even Lucas thinks that when my intuition tells me something, she should take it seriously.

My hobbies. Well, obviously, I like art, and I like to travel. I like to draw and paint. I'm actually pretty good at painting. That's maybe partly because my dad is an actual artist—you know, a genetic thing. I'm okay at drawing, but I'm really good with color and composition, and I like to create new things.

I also love, love, love to write in my journal.  Some people say I'm a good writer, and that's maybe partly because my mom is a professional writer.

Here's something that you might not know from reading The Mystery of the Third Lucretia. All my life my dad has been teaching me how to fly fish. In fact, over the summer I was named Junior Casting Champion of Wabasha, Minnesota. Casting is something you do in fly fishing, and Wabasha is where my dad lives. This casting thing is really, really important in my next book, Rescuing Seneca Crane.

I take piano lessons and play tennis and soccer. In the winter I like to cross-country ski. I also take karate lessons with Lucas and Mom. And Lucas and Mom are getting me into politics.

Music. I like all the usual music you probably listen to, like stuff by Colbie Calliat, Kelly Clarkson and Sarah Bareilles. But thanks to Lucas I'm getting more into indie rock these days. Right now my favorite group is called Tiny Masters of Today. I especially like their songs "Stickin' It to the Man" and "Bushie." When Mom's around, we sometimes listen to classical music, which I like. I especially like Bach and Handel and other people who wrote music about that time. That kind of music is called Baroque.

Favorite books. I love to read. Lucas and I read all the Nancy Drew books together when we were in fifth and sixth grades, and I loved them. Some of my other favorite books are these:

• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, is about a brother and sister, Claudia and Jamie, who run away and hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It has art and mystery in it, so no wonder I like it!
• Chasing Vermeer is another book about two kids, art and mystery. If you liked The Mystery of the Third Lucretia, you'll love this book. Just read it. Trust me.
• The Bloodwater mysteries: Snatched, Scullduggery, and Doppelganger. These books all have the same couple of kids solving mysteries. I like them partly because they're set in Minnesota, where I live, but I mostly like them because I like to hang out with the two kids, Roni and Brian, and the mysteries are really good!
• Godless, which is by a guy who's one of the authors of the Bloodwater mysteries. It's about these kids who decide to worship a water tower. I know it sounds totally weird, but it's really, really good. It won some kind of big award, so obviously other people thought it was good, too.
• Other books I like are The Secret Garden, all of the Anne of Green Gables books, and all the Little House on the Prairie books. We just read Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird in my English class and I thought they were both absolutely awesome. They're probably the best books I've read in my whole life. I've also read all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I'm starting in on Agatha Christie and a mystery author named Dorothy L. Sayers. As you can tell, I really, really like mysteries.

LUCAS ERIN STICKNEY

Her name. Lucas is my best friend, and she's a girl. She got her name because her dad really wanted a boy.

How old she is and what she looks like. Lucas is fourteen, like I am. She's thin, has blue eyes and naturally curly reddish blonde hair. Sometimes she wears her contacts, but most of the time she just wears her glasses, because she's totally not into looks. She wears jeans any time she can get by with it.

Lucas's family. Lucas comes from a very weird family. Lucas's family has tons of cash, and they're miserable. Lucas has a nickname for her father, Allen the A----. It's a word I can't say, and I'll probably get in trouble for even putting in this much. Lucas and I came up with a word we substitute for words like that. Our word is "meep." So when we're around people, we call Lucas's dad Allen the Meep. He's mean to everybody except Lucas's little brother, Justin. Justin, is such a meephead that he's not even worth writing about. Lucas's mother is Camellia—Lucas calls her the Fair Camellia. She's gorgeous, and from the South, and still talks with a big fake Southern accent when she's trying to impress somebody. She's totally into clothes and looks, which is the complete opposite of Lucas.  Allen and Camellia fight all the time. Lucas's Grandma Stickney is the only decent person in the family.  She's been really important to Lucas. She's smart and loving and interesting, and Lucas is just like her. Lucas even looks like pictures of her grandmother when she was young.

School and brains and memory. Lucas goes to a private school, which is a pretty stuck-up place.  But she has good teachers, which is a very good thing, because Lucas has a super-big brain. Lucas is a lot smarter than I am. I get good grades, but those tests you take in school show that she's almost a genius. Last year she won first prize in a physics contest, and this year she's joining this team that represents her school at academic contests. She's been taking French since she was in second grade, so she's really good at speaking it.

What makes Lucas wonderful. Lucas is my best friend, so of course I think she's wonderful. But there are a couple things about her that are really and truly special. One is that she's one of the bravest people I know. Except for spiders, she's not afraid of anything, and she doesn't take any meep from anybody. She just stands right up to them and talks back. I call her Lucas the Lionheart, or Nerves of Steel Stickney. The other thing that's special about her is her memory. For some reason—I suppose it's part of that big brain thing—Lucas has what's called a photographic memory, which means she sort of takes a picture of everything she's ever seen in her life and stores it in her mind, like on a hard drive. It's absolutely amazing. Her photographic memory was really important in solving The Mystery of the Third Lucretia.

Hobbies. You wouldn't believe how well Lucas can draw. She draws well because of her photographic memory—like I said, she can remember almost every single thing she's ever seen in her life, and it turns out she can draw it the way it looked. Also, she's very careful and tries to get everything exactly right. I think the word is analytical. Right now she's also into this Africa thing. Her whole school is doing an African Awareness quarter or semester or something, and she's totally into learning everything there is to know about Africa. She takes violin and plays in her school orchestra. She also plays soccer on the same team I'm on, and we go to karate together.

Oh, and she's totally political. Her Grandma Stickney has always been into politics, and she's gotten Lucas into politics, too. Lucas and my mom talk about politics a lot. Right now she's working for Obama. Sometimes I help, too. I'm less political than she is, but she's helping me get more active. We've gone to a few anti-war rallies together.

Music. Lucas is not as into pop music as I am. In fact, she's not as into music in general as I am.  When she listens, it's mostly to, like, U2 and David Bowie and indie rock. And she's the one who got me started listening to the Tiny Masters of Today.

Books. I'm not even going to start on the books Lucas reads. She's into nonfiction more than fiction. She reads books about all kinds of things, and she remembers everything she's ever read—about geography and history and the food we eat and global warming and medieval life and castles and religion—it just goes on and on. So she's always full of facts.

GILLIAN WELLES

Mom is Gillian Welles Sundgren, although nowadays she mostly just goes by Gillian Welles. Her first name is pronounced like Jillian, but it's spelled the English way. She's kind of tall, has green eyes and naturally curly black hair with a little gray in it. (I'm trying to get her to dye her hair, and I think she's going to do it.) Mom and I look a lot alike. Everybody says so.

When I met Lucas, I was used to not being rich, because Mom was a journalist for a newspaper and she didn't make much money. But she and I always had a good time even when we were broke. We found lots of things to do for free or cheap and we never were hungry or homeless or anything, which is luckier than a lot of people.

But as you know if you've read Lucretia, she got a job for The Scene magazine, a really good magazine for teenagers. She was International-Europe contributing editor. She had to write a lot about fashion, but she always liked to write stories about art and cultural things.

So after our adventure in Amsterdam, she got a job with Internationale magazine, which is about all kinds of things going on in the world. It's perfect for her, because she gets to write only about art and culture (so far, anyway), and it's for adults.

Mom hasn't dated much while I've been growing up. She hasn't said why not, but I think it's because she thinks being a single mom keeps her busy enough without having a man around. But she's pretty good looking for somebody her age, plus she has these incredible long, gorgeous legs, and I have a feeling that one of these days she'll probably get interested in guys again, or some guy will get really interested in her. I don't know how I'd feel if that happened.

Mom is absolutely nuts about art. All kinds of art. She's taken me to museums all my life. She always has season tickets to the orchestra—sometimes it's The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, sometimes it's the Minnesota Orchestra—and she goes to a lot of dance performances and plays. Sometimes I go along, sometimes Lucas and I go with her, and sometimes she goes with friends. She has a lot of friends.

Mom loves to read, she's big into politics, and she's really good at karate. She also loves to eat, and she's a pretty good cook. She's always trying to get me to be interested in food the way she is, but I'm just flat not. She sometimes has people over for dinner and she makes me help with getting ready and serving and cleaning up and things. It's a drag.

But she's not bad, as moms go.  

KARL SUNDGREN

Karl Sundgren is my father. He's tall and blond and really good looking for his age.

Like I said, he's an artist.  He paints a lot of portraits, and I guess he's really good at it. His portraits don't look real, but you can always tell who they're supposed to look like, and they're not totally weird like Picasso. His most famous paintings are a bunch of portraits he painted of other artists. Some famous people and some not. A few of those paintings are in museums. He's always taught me how to paint and draw, and he's really proud that I'm pretty good at it.

Dad lives in a houseboat on the Mississippi River in a little town called Wabasha, Minnesota. I visit him a lot on weekends, and I always go down to stay with him for a week or longer in the summer. A lot of the time we go out fly fishing. Sometimes we go away for the weekend, almost always to Lake Superior, where we hang out around the boats and the big ships. A few times we’ve even rented a sailboat.  My dad is definitely a boat kind of guy. I have a pretty good time with him on weekends.

But the time I spend with him in the summer isn't as much fun. It always starts out fine, we go out fly fishing and he teaches me to paint, and it's always fun for about a week. But by then it gets obvious that he wants me out of the way so he can have his girlfriends over and have parties and drink too much—in fact, a couple times he's even done that kind of thing when I was there, although Mom doesn't know or she'd never let me go back.

Mom has never told me exactly why they got their divorce. But when I see the way he is even when I'm around, I think I can guess.

Still, I know my dad loves me, and I love him. It's just that I don't want to spend too much time with him.  Besides, it's a small houseboat.

My name is Kari Sundgren. This story is about how my best friend Lucas and I got mixed up in a big, international art crime, and all the adventures we had doing it. Lucas is Lucas Stickney. She's a girl.

"Kari’s authentic narration, her strong realistic friendship with Lucas, the cosmopolitan settings, and the carefully plotted mystery combine in a winning read that ends with the suggestion of continued adventures."
- Booklist and Book Links (Starred and boxed review)

"Lots of action, authentic emotions, friendship strains, mother-daughter conflicts ... Runholt gets it all just right in this novel."
- Kliatt (Starred review)

"Runholt delivers a crackingly good mystery, complete with smart and savvy heroines, a long-lost Rembrandt painting (or is it?) and enough wonderful background info on great art and art-museum cities to fill a guidebook.  I couldn't put it down!"                                   - Book Sense Picks, Summer 2008       

"Mystery fans will enjoy this clever, engaging story."
- Kirkus

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