Sold as Seen

Fourteen Welsh plates. A lie about where they came from. And a dealer who never lived to spend the money.

Apple blossom has come to Wenhope, a black-and-white market town on the Welsh border, and Ashby's, the town's century-old auction house, is ready for its Spring Fine Sale. Harriet Pryce, Ashby's new valuer, left a glittering London saleroom under a cloud and only wants a quiet life among other people's wardrobes.

Then Lionel Hext, the town's most charming dealer, consigns a set of rare Nantgarw porcelain plates with a story attached: bought, he says, from a hill farm over the border, fair and square, forty-seven years ago. An anonymous postcard says otherwise.

On sale day, as the hammer falls at forty-one thousand pounds, Lionel raises his silver flask to wet the lot, and dies in the front row in front of half the district.

A bad heart, says the town. But Hattie has held those plates, turned them over and read what someone scratched on the back, and she knows a false provenance when she has written one. With a parrot who has opinions, a porter who knows every house in the Marches, a restorer who thinks valuers are undertakers with price lists, and a detective who calls her "the auction lady", Hattie has to find out who was really sold as seen.

Sold as Seen is the first 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.