For two years, Cyrus and Antigone Smith have run a sagging roadside motel with their older brother, Daniel. Nothing ever seems to happen. Then a strange old man with bone tattoos arrives, demanding a specific room.

Less than 24 hours later, the old man is dead. The motel has burned, and Daniel is missing. And Cyrus and Antigone are kneeling in a crowded hall, swearing an oath to an order of explorers who have long served as caretakers of the world's secrets, keepers of powerful relics from lost civilizations, and jailers to unkillable criminals who have terrorized the world for millennia.

N. D. Wilson is the best-selling author of the 100 Cupboards series (Random House), Leepike Ridge (Random House), and Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl (Thomas Nelson). He writes up in the top of the tall skinny house where he lives with the blue-eyed girl he stole from the ocean (and their five young explorers, two tortoises, and one snake). He has adventured for National Geographic Channel, is currently adapting C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce for the screen, and once—in the fourth grade—split his buddy's arrow while shooting at a mattress from twenty yards.

Watch him talk about 100 Cupboards on The TODAY Show here.