This is what my official biography says about me:

Award-winning Susan Runholt, author of the Kari and Lucas mystery series, shares her teenage heroines' love of art and travel and commitment to feminism. She has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia and Africa, and lived in Amsterdam and Paris, working as a bank clerk and an au pair. She's also been a waitress, a maid, a motel desk clerk, a laundress, a caterer, and director of programming for South Dakota Public Television.

For the past two decades she has lived in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she serves as a fundraising consultant for social service and arts organizations.  She was named runner-up for the Debut Dagger Award by the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain for The Mystery of the Third Lucretia.

Okay. That's fine as far as it goes.  But what am I really like? 

Well, as you might be able to guess, I'm something like Kari's mom, Gillian, although she's tall and has dark, curly hair, and I'm medium height and blonde.  And she's a smarter mother than I could ever be.  But we have the same political outlook, share a sense of humor, and we both have brothers—I have two, she has one.  Oh, and we both are single mothers with one daughter.

I also have interests that reflect hers.  More than almost anything else in the world besides my family, I love to travel.  And I love art and museums and classical music and good food.  And let me tell you, I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky to be able to write books about art and travel (and, when I can sneak it in, food).  Because, as much as I love all those other things, I love writing books even more.

Best of all, I love my daughter, Annalisa.  I bring that up because she's a big part of the Kari and Lucas mysteries.  In fact, it's not too much to say that without her, I would never have written those books. And I might not ever have written for kids.

The way it started was this.  From the time Annalisa was really young, she and I always went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts together for the same reason Kari and her mom go—because it's fun and it's free.  Well, when she was eleven (this was many years ago, because Annalisa is all grown up now), we went there to see Rembrandt's two paintings of Lucretia, which were being exhibited together. Annalisa loved them.  And when she read the sign on the wall beside the paintings and looked at the sad, sad woman Rembrandt had painted, she cried.  This was such a big deal for her that she actually came home and wrote a letter to the director of the museum telling him how much she liked the paintings.  He wrote a letter back and gave her some books and things.  (The lesson here is that it always pays to say thanks, but sometimes it pays more than others.)

Anyway, two years later, she and I went to Europe and visited London and Paris. And it turned out that she loved to travel just as much as I did. 

All this time, Annalisa was The Perfect Child.  I am not kidding.  She was always sweet and kind and never made any trouble for anyone.  Well, when she turned fourteen she decided she was, um, over that.  She'd been perfect, and now she was ready to do something else for a change. And boy did she.  I'm not going to tell her story—it's her story, after all, not mine.  But I will say that our relationship really floundered.  We could hardly say anything to each other without making each other mad or making each other cry.  It was the hardest time in my whole life, and probably one of the hardest in hers, too.

I had written a book for adults by that time and had started writing a second. But at some point it occurred to me that maybe Annalisa and I could write a book together, and that would give us something to talk about.  So I tried to think of what kind of plot would be interesting to both of us.  I'd already kind of decided that I wanted to write books that were set in faraway places, and since Annalisa loved London and Paris, I thought she'd be interested in a book set in those cities.  But what could the mystery be about?  I thought and thought, and then I remembered how much she had loved Rembrandt's two Lucretias.  That was how I came up with the idea of the Third Lucretia.

Writing a book together worked to get us talking.  It was the one thing we could discuss without fighting.  Annalisa decided who the characters would be, what their names would be, what they looked like and what their personalities were like.  She read every part of the book and said things like, "Mo-om, forget it, kids wouldn't be interested in this," or, "Yeah, this is really exciting!" 

So when I say in the dedication that she helped me write The Mystery of the Third Lucretia, I'm totally serious. She really did.  And she's gone on to contribute to Rescuing Seneca Crane And the Third Kari + Lucas Mystery, Adventure at Simba Hill.  And I'm really, really grateful.

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