Provenance Unknown

A mug with his name on it. A plant in her own garden. And the man who ruined her career, dead on Twelfth Night.

Christmas has come to Wenhope, a black-and-white market town on the Welsh border, and Hattie Pryce, valuer at Ashby's auction house, has invited the one man she swore she would never see again. Piers Hallam, her old head of department at a grand London saleroom, let her take the blame for the forged watercolour that ended her career. Now another fake has surfaced, and Piers arrives with the evidence, the charm, and a plan to find the forger before the twelve days are out.

He finds the town instead. He charms the museum, feeds the local paper, sits down with the dealers' ring, and lets it be known that the obvious answer is Hattie.

At the Twelfth Night wassail, when the whole town goes up to the cider orchard with lanterns, hot cider and shotguns to wake the apple trees, Hattie ladles his drink into a mug with his name on it and hands it to him herself. Before morning he is dead of monkshood. Monkshood grows in Hattie's own garden.

Arrested, released and watched by everyone she knows, with a restorer she badly wants to trust, a parrot with opinions, a detective who is allergic to Christmas trees, and a slipware mug that has held her pencils for twenty years without a history, Hattie has to find out where everything in this case has really been, starting with herself.

Provenance Unknown is the fourth 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.