Nancy Kunhardt Lodge

MONA LISA'S GHOST, a thrilling mystery, is the sequel to The Crystal Navigator in this Adventure series. During a class video about the Mona Lisa, Lucy Nightingale and her best friend, Sam Winter notice that the painting seems to be melting. Sam thinks it has been attacked by a molecule-destroying syndrome called Zoom Seizure. On winter vacation, Lucy and her parents go to Paris where she can investigate. In the Mona Lisa Gallery of the Louvre Museum, Lucy bumps into Melissa Blackwood, a classmate from home. Melissa shocks Lucy telling her that she is the reincarnation of Mona Lisa and that she has come back to steal the painting. That night, the painting is mysteriously stolen and Lucy must find it before Zoom Seizure destroys it. In an adventure that takes Lucy through the ghost-infested Catacombs of Paris, down underground rivers, and back to sixteenth-century France, she solves a mystery that would shock the world if it were ever made public. This coming-of-age series is sure to entertain and inspire young readers as Lucy learns to trust her intuition, see herself, others, and the world around her with greater clarity, and to believe in the magic that lies inside every one of us.

The Gravity Thief: Book 3 in the Lucy Nightingale adventures. A child climbs out of Vermeer's Music Lesson to explore the gallery. Two men steal the painting before the boy has a chance to climb back in, leaving him marooned in a strange atmosphere. Curious about why someone wanted this painting and anxious to save the child, Lucy discovers that Vermeer hid five polygons from a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci in the windows of the Music Lesson. Leonardo's shapes were a blueprint for a powerful machine that could be used for good or evil. Lucy and Sam trace the theft to a sick mastermind intent on building a machine that could suck the world into a Black Hole. What begins as a quest to rescue a child becomes a chase to save the world.