Reserve Not Met

A country house full of treasures. An heir who has been quietly selling them. And a lake that keeps its secrets until morning.

High summer has come to Wenhope, a black-and-white market town on the Welsh border, and Ashby's, its century-old auction house, has the sale of the year: three days in a marquee on the lawn at Tallowmere Court, where eighty-eight-year-old Honor Delahaye is selling the second-best of everything to mend her roof.

Hattie Pryce, Ashby's valuer, has catalogued nine hundred lots, and some of them are not what they seem. The family silver has hallmarks that would not cut butter. The star lot, a portrait of a Delahaye bride, fails to reach its reserve while the local dealers sit on their hands. And Honor's charming great-nephew Sebastian has an answer for everything.

On the last night of the sale Sebastian takes his glass of port down to the end of the jetty, as he has every night of his life. In the morning the gardener finds him in the lake.

Everyone knew he would go in one day. But Hattie has looked at the port in his glass and the port in the decanter, and they are not the same. With a parrot who has opinions, a restorer who can read the back of a painting like a letter, a detective with hay fever and a stuffed pike, and a house full of copies, Hattie has to find the one thing at Tallowmere that is real.

Reserve Not Met is the second 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.