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.