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 It is more fun to read this page after you have read the book!
Mystery is all around us! Just think about the places around you. The abandoned house down the road. A spooky path through the woods. A local ghost story. An old box of letters in the attic. The "characters" in your own family or neighborhood.
The Puzzle in the Portrait
 For me, it all started here. This portrait of my great grandfather was rescued from a garage, then it hung for many years on the wall of my father's house. One day I began thinking about the portrait. Wouldn't it be mysterious if something were hidden behind the frame? And what if that "something" led to an unsolved crime from long ago? Now I was on my way to writing a mystery.
I wove many of the people and places of my own family history into the story. The Diamond Prairie Farm is a real place. It was a wedding gift to my great grandparents, and the place where my grandfather was born. Find a map of Ohio. Put your finger on Columbus, the state capital. Move your finger to the left (west) and a little bit north and you will find a town called "Plain City." The Diamond Prairie Farm is in Madison County, not far from Plain City.
This is the little house at the Diamond Prairie Farm as it looked when I first started writing the book. It had been empty and abandoned for many years.
Yes, there is a diamond-shaped stone in front of the Diamond Prairie Farm. My great- great-grandfather's name is carved into the stone. In my story, I made up the fact that the date 1879 appeared on the stone. Strangely, when I looked at this picture with a magnifying glass after my book was published, I discovered that the year 1879 was indeed carved into the stone!
There are many other real-life details in The Puzzle in the Portrait. The beach and lighthouse in the story are located on Deer Isle, Maine; the ghost story is a story I heard as a child when visiting my great grandmother's house in Ohio; the attic room that Elizabeth and Jonathan investigate is like a room in the attic of that house. What's made up in the story? Everything about the mystery itself -- the note, the words written on the back of the portrait, and of course the buried treasure itself. That's why it's fun to write stories. You can be inspired by real life but make your story as exciting as you want.
 And, oh yes, the parakeet Fritzy is based on a real parakeet. Our beloved olive-green parakeet was quite a talker. He especially liked to talk about brushing teeth. "Brush your teeth!" he would mutter. "Did you brush your teeth?" He loved walking around on a game board and stealing the markers.
Do you have any questions or comments about the book?
E-mail the author 
Background about The Mystery of the Ancient Coins
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