Speaker 1: Hi. This is Elizabeth Eulberg and I'm the author of "The Great Shelby Holmes." Let me tell you a little bit about how I came to write this book and then I'll share an excerpt with you. It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Sherlock Holmes was the inspiration for the Great Shelby Homes and as a kid I loved reading Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and other detective stories.

And so I had so much fun researching to write this book because I had to do a ton of research. I not only had to read the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle and watch the movies as well, I also had to a lot of research on solving crimes and criminology which was a lot of fun. And with the books that I'm doing for the Shelby Home series I have to do so much outlining.

It's really funny to figure out the cases that Shelby and Watson have to solve but also who are going to be all of the suspects. But even though this story is about solving crime, at the heart it's about the friendship between my John Watson who moved to New York City after living on Army Posts and Shelby Holmes who doesn't think she needs a friend.

And so Watson teaches her a little bit about friendship while Shelby teaches Watson about solving crimes. And now I'm going to read an excerpt for you. This is the very beginning of the first book in the Great Shelby Holmes series. Every writer needs a good story to tell so here is my problem. I had nothing to write about because nothing exciting had ever happened to me.

Seriously. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Diddly squat. You'd think that someone who grew up on four different Army posts in 11 years would have witnessed at least one exciting thing. Yeah. You'd think. Nope. My life equals boring. Then we moved from Maryland to New York City and my new neighbor tried to blow up the building.