THE AUTHOR

Three years ago, my grandmother woke me from a dead sleep.

This would be unremarkable except for one thing: Catalina Kennedy had already passed away. But that night, she was there—vivid, urgent, more real than any dream I’d had before or since. She had one message for me:
Write my story.

I woke up with my heart pounding and a single, terrifying thought:
I’m not a writer.

I’m a music teacher. A violinist. I’ve spent my life reading notes on a staff, not crafting them into sentences. Fiction? Fantasy? That was a different language entirely.

But her voice wouldn’t let me go…

This story is for my daughter—so she’ll know that treasure hunters flow in her bloodline, that her great-great-grandfather vanished into the Amazon chasing legends, and his son discovered the Incan Mask of Gold, which sits in the Lima Museum of Gold right now.