When her friend is killed, appraiser Josie Prescott, hired to locate a valuable antique, finds the murderer to boot.
Josie Prescott has a successful antiques business, good friends and a romance with Police Chief Ty Alverez. Now if only her acquaintances would stop getting murdered. When her friend Rosalie Chaffee’s body washes up on the New Hampshire shore, Josie is questioned by the police. Unwilling to report gossip, she keeps many of her thoughts about who might have killed Rosalie to herself until she starts getting threatening phone calls and gifts of flowers from the same creepy secret admirer who’d bugged Rosalie, a doctoral candidate at a nearby college who’d been ghostwriting a book for (and having an affair with) a local businessman with a jealous wife. A few other ex-boyfriends, including one known only as Chief, may have had motives for murder. So may a colleague Rosalie had sued for attempting to steal her research. Then Rosalie’s 12-year-old sister Paige, who’d lived with her since their parents died in an accident, asks for Josie’s help in finding a valuable antique. Josie searches in some unusual places before she discovers the mysterious item and a cold-blooded killer.
The third in the series (Deadly Appraisal, 2007, etc.) contains all the usual antiques lore along with romance and a fine set of suspects.
