Going, Going, Gone

An auctioneer who cannot say "gone". A cider farm in the full flood of harvest. And a good man missing for three days.

Autumn has come to Wenhope, a black-and-white market town on the Welsh border, and three days before the Michaelmas Fine Sale the grand old lady of Ashby's auction house breaks her hip on her own rostrum steps. Hattie Pryce, Ashby's valuer, has not taken a sale since the London scandal that ended her career. Now she has to.

She manages forty-five lots. On the forty-sixth, a Victorian silver cup with one blank shield, she freezes, and Tudor Gwilliam, the big, kind livestock auctioneer from the market across the yard, walks up and says the word for her. Days later he teaches her to sell sheep. That Saturday, on the night of the mop fair, he goes down to look at the river in spate and does not come home.

For three days the whole town searches the Lenn. On the third afternoon Hattie is standing in the doorway of the old cider house at Cold Orchard when the candle goes out.

Everyone says it was an accident. But Tudor told Hattie himself never to walk into a working cider house without a candle at the knee, and the candle by the door was never lit. With a parrot who has opinions, a restorer she has kissed once and is trying not to think about, a detective who is allergic to windfalls and a silver cup with a blank where the last name should be, Hattie has to find out who Tudor trusted enough to walk into the dark.

Going, Going, Gone is the third Wenhope Saleroom Mystery: a warm, witty, fairly clued British cosy with an auction-house sleuth, a slow-burn romance, a very old African grey and absolutely no gore.