A missing lot. A dead cataloguer. And a cash register that only rings the truth.
When a big regional auction house rolls into Kettlebrook to disperse the hoard of the late, reclusive collector Prudence Ainsworth, antiques-shop owner Addie Wrent expects a week of good bidding and better gossip. What she gets is a box lot with a nineteen-twenties brass cash register inside, a slip of paper in her late great-aunt's handwriting, and three words that should not exist: make sure 47 comes home.
Then Lot 47, a plain rosewood writing slope catalogued for almost nothing, vanishes from a locked hall overnight. By morning the auction house's meticulous cataloguer is dead at the foot of the loft stair, his master ledger gone with him, and the town has decided it was an accident.
Addie knows better, because Addie can no longer leave an object unhandled, and her newest one has opinions. The register does not ring things high because they are valuable. It rings them high when they are lying, and it has started screaming at the auctioneer's quietest lots.
With her archivist almost-something Perry Watt, a prickly appraiser with a guilty secret, and a shop full of animated antiques who help exactly as much as they meddle, Addie follows a trail of laundered provenance back forty-seven years, to a vanished dealer, a stolen history, and a charming man who learned the price of everything and the value of nothing. The truth is hidden in the one object that walked off in the dark. And whoever took it has already killed to keep it quiet.
The Auction House Affair is the third Crabapple Antiques Mystery: a cozy, closed-case whodunit with a meddling small town, a slow-burn romance, a fair-play puzzle, and a cast of opinionated objects who have never once been merely decorative. Murder off the page, warmth on every one.