Goodreads asked Paula Berinstein:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Paula Berinstein I love mysteries, and I’ve always wondered if I could write them. But before I could start, I had to invent a detective. I wanted it to be a woman because I thought I could get inside a woman’s head better than a man’s, and I wanted her to be unusual. I came up with the idea of a young woman who would rebel against her upbringing. Her family would be intellectual and college-educated, but she wouldn’t want to be anything like them, so she’d become a plumber. And so I made her a plumber’s apprentice. In the first story, she’d find a dead body under a house when she crawled underneath to fix a pipe.

I got the idea of her being descended from the fictional character Inspector Lestrade because unlike Amanda, I love Sherlock Holmes and I wanted to use him in the story, but only indirectly. Trying to follow Conan Doyle’s amazing act was just too intimidating, so I didn’t want to write about Holmes himself. Since I like the idea of finding out more about minor characters, Lestrade was the perfect choice.

I also thought that being American, I would naturally be able to write about an American character, so I made Amanda American. At first the entire setting for the story was going to be Los Angeles—specifically Woodland Hills—which I know really well. But I couldn’t make that setting interesting enough, so I moved the story to England, which is where my husband, Alan, comes from.

But I still had difficulty—until I came up with the idea of making Amanda a kid. Once I did that, I was able to invent a school for her to attend, and everything fell into place. Writing for kids allowed me to come up with some crazy ideas, such as a sugar conspiracy, which adults might have trouble taking seriously.

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