Bio

Tracy Mack is the author of Birdland, named a Book Sense Top Ten Book and a Sydney Taylor Award Honor Book, among other accolades. Her first novel, Drawing Lessons, drew praise, as well, including being named a Booklist Top Ten First Novel. Mack also works as a children's book editor. Michael Citrin is an attorney and avid Sherlock Holmes fan. By the age of twelve, he had read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sacred Writings and began collecting Sherlockiana, even going so far as attempting to recreate Holmes's famous sitting room in the basement of his house.

How do these two work together? "In our marriage, we have collaborated on many things: taxes, a vegetable garden, home improvements, and our young daughter. But it was a shared love of books that first brought us together, and it's always been a dream of ours to collaborate creatively on a book. One critical point we discovered early on is that we have to surrender our egos to best serve the story. We pass the drafts back and forth, each rewriting until we're satisfied."

While readers the world over are familiar with literature's most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, Mack and Citrin wanted to focus on his young assistants-a gang of boys called The Baker Street Irregulars. "I've always wondered why the Irregulars are mentioned in just two short stories and two novels out of the entire canon of sixty stories. We felt it was time to give the Irregulars their due," says Citrin. "I noticed there hadn't been a traditional mystery series for kids in a while," adds Mack. "Growing up, I always loved Encyclopedia Brown, Harriet the Spy, and Nancy Drew, and somewhere in my humblest fantasies was the wish to one day create a new mystery series with memorable characters like these to add to this rich tradition."

Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin live in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts.