Super-snobby eleven-year-old Clara Frankofile has all she could possibly want. Her parents are rich, she lives in an apartment with its own roller coaster, and anyone who is anyone in New York City is terrified of her. Each night at her parents' fashionable restaurant, Pish Posh, Clara watches the celebrity diners, deciding who is important enough to stay and who must be banished. But Clara's world turns upside down when she discovers a mystery happening right under her nose. With the help of her new friend - a brilliant twelve-year-old jewel thief - Clara begins to look at life differently, and she may just be able to solve this most intriguing case. "This zany mixture of reality and fantasy…offers many interesting characters for readers to ponder…." —Booklist Like my character, Olivia Kidney, I grew up in a high-rise apartment building in New York City’s Upper West Side. In fact, the idea for Olivia Kidney came from a game I used to play when I was about eight or nine years old. I would watch people in the building’s elevator (most of whom I knew nothing about) and make up crazy stories about their apartments. There was one woman, for instance, who was sort of chubby and always cheerful, so I imagined that she lived in an apartment made entirely of chocolate! I imagined that her walls were made of chocolate, so she could lick them, and her furniture was chocolate, and she had a chocolate refrigerator that only contained chocolate eggs and chocolate milk. And if she got hungry in the middle of the night, she could nibble on her bed. I remember the exact moment when I knew, without a doubt, that I wanted to be a writer. I was eleven years old and I was in my school library, strolling through the aisles, trying to decide what to read next. Should it be A Wrinkle in Time? Or maybe Harriet the Spy. In a flash, I decided that the best books in the world were written for eleven-year-olds! Sadly, my twelfth birthday was just around the corner. So I reasoned that the only thing to do was to grow up and write books for eleven-year-olds. Which is pretty much what happened (after many years and piles of rejections letters). I studied creative writing at Binghamton University. After graduating I worked many different jobs while I continued to write. I was a dog groomer, a construction worker, an art teacher, and a waitress. Having lots of different jobs is a terrific advantage for a writer. Because of them, I know all kinds of oddball things, which I’ve used in my books, like how to remove bubble gum from a dog’s fur (peanut butter). In fact, it was while I was addressing envelopes during a boring stint as a receptionist that a name caught my eye: Olivia Kidney. What a great name, I thought! I jotted it down in my journal. Years later, while thumbing through my old journals, I spotted the name and decided it was perfect for the feisty twelve-year-old heroine of my first children’s book. These days, my husband and I live in upstate New York with our new baby boy and a motley assortment of badly behaved animals. For more information visit www.ellenpotter.com. Chapter 11 If you walked into the Pish Posh restaurant on any given night, you would be sure to find a smallish eleven-year-old girl wearing large black sunglasses sitting by herself at a little round table in the back. She had excellent posture and kept quite still—no fidgeting, no hair twisting, no smiling—while she watched the glittery and fabulous customers come and go. Because her glasses were so large and so black, you could not tell whom she was looking at, which made the glittery, fabulous customers at the Pish Posh restaurant very, very nervous. Today, the girl in the dark glasses, whose name was Clara Frankofile, was sitting at her customary table with a tuna-fish sandwich, cut into four perfect triangles, and a tall glass of tomato juice with a straw. She had not touched the sandwich, but she took regular and small sips from the tomato juice as she gazed around the restaurant with sharp, assessing eyes. It was the middle of August and New York City was experiencing a heat wave, but Clara was not dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, like most eleven-year-old girls. Instead, she wore a simple black dress. It was the same dress that she wore every day (well, not the same, exact one—she owned 157 copies of it). In fact, she had been wearing the same simple black dress, in varying sizes, since the day she was born. Her parents, who owned the Pish Posh restaurant, had decided that a simple black dress was the epitome of style, and that their child should always look stylish. They had a tailor sew tiny, simple black dresses no bigger than a napkin for the infant Clara. And as she grew, they found no reason for their daughter to stop wearing simple black dresses. When she was eight years old, Clara decided to add a pair of large black sunglasses to her outfit, and tucked away in her jewelry box was a necklace strung with perfect Tahitian pearls, which she