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Informationen zum Autor P. D. BACCALARIO was born in Acqui Terme, a beautiful little town in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. He grew up in the woods with his three dogs and his black bicycle. He loves seeing new places and discovering new lifestyles, although, in the end, he always returns to the comfort of familiar ones. Klappentext In the third installment of the Century Quartet! Italian author P. D. Baccalario continues the mystery that will take four cities and four extraordinary kids to solve. PARIS! JUNE 20. A meeting with an archaeologist friend of Harvey's dad brings Mistral! Elettra! Harvey! and Sheng together again in Paris. The friend gives them a clock that once belonged to Napoléon! and she tells them that it will lead them to another object of power. The clock sends the kids all over Paris! through old churches and forgotten museum exhibits! in search of an artifact linked to the Egyptian goddess Isis. But a woman with a penchant for venomous snakes and carnivorous plants-and her vast network of spies-is watching their every move. . . . Fans of Blue Balliet! Trenton Lee Stewart! and Michael Scott will be drawn to this Da Vinci Code-like adventure for kids. 1 THE BEES Five years have passed. Tiny insects are dancing outside the window, hovering up and down in lazy spirals, forming circles in the air. They're handfuls of dots scattered in the sky. They're bees. The bees of Montmartre, the historic artists' district of Paris. On the sixth floor of a building on rue de l'Abreuvoir, surrounded by the sound of the buzzing bees, Mistral smiles. Her elbows are propped on the windowsill, her chin resting on the palms of her hands, her dreamy eyes lost in the endless whirl of activity. The beehive is just below the roof, in the shelter of the gutter. A few months ago, the bees' home was practically invisible, just a little hexagon of wax. But when she returned from her trip to New York, it was already as big as an egg carton, nestled between the copper gutter and the overhang. "Almost two hundred thousand kilometers . . . ," Mistral whispers, watching a forager bee fly off and disappear down the street below. That's how far a hive of bees needs to fly, sucking up nectar from flower to flower, to make one kilogram of honey. A real race against time before the start of winter. Do they have enough flowers? the girl wonders, lost in thought. Just in case, she always keeps little plants and fresh flowers on the windowsill. It's afternoon. As she has on many other afternoons spent watching the bees, Mistral imagines with horror that someone in the building might notice them and, with a single swipe of a broom, destroy seven months of hard work done by ten thousand bees. That's according to the calculations, drawings and notes she's made in her sketchbook. A plump yellow bee hovers over a bunch of violets. Mistral watches the insect alight on a blossom and hears it buzzing as the petals stir sweetly between its feet. Fascinated by this beautiful sight, she picks up a pencil and her sketchbook and draws it. She can see the grains of yellow pollen on its tiny legs. It's incredible how a simple bunch of flowers can contain an entire universe. . . . Beyond her window, Paris spreads out in all its glory, with sparkling rooftops, the white cupola of Sacré-Coeur and, on the other side of the Seine River, the Eiffel Tower. Gleaming in the distance like stone bellflowers are the spires of Notre Dame. "Mistral!" her mother calls from the living room. "It's late!" Mistral's so accustomed to being alone at home that she's almost startled. "Oh! My lesson!" she says, putting down her sketchpad and rushing out her bedroom door. She hurries over to her mother, who is rummaging through her purse, looking for her keys. Her mother glances at her wrist to check the time but realizes she isn't wearing a w...
