Lot Thirteen

A room nobody has opened in four years. And the man who knew every secret, dead behind its door.Spring has come back to Wenhope, a black-and-white market town on the Welsh border, and Ashby's auction house is a hundred years old. To mark it, Delia Ashby is breaking the saleroom's oldest rule: the centenary sale will have a Lot 13, the first in its history, and it is the picture that has hung over her bed for forty-five years.Then a dapper old London picture dealer in a panama walks into the May Fair and introduces himself to Hattie Pryce, Ashby's valuer. She knows his name. His name has turned up in the paperwork of the forgery that ended her London career. He has come to sell what he knows, and he wants the centenary room to hear it.On the morning after the birthday party, Hattie and Delia climb the back stairs to the locked room that belonged to Delia's late husband, and open the door at last. Inside is everything Hattie has been afraid of for a year, and the man in the panama, dead in the chair. The door was locked from outside. Delia has the only key.With a parrot who remembers everyone, a restorer who has agreed with her to wait until "e;after the A-levels"e;, a detective whose hay fever has come back with the blossom, and a sale to hold that the whole town is waiting for, Hattie has to find out who else had a key, and how to tell the truth kindly enough that Wenhope keeps its saleroom.Lot Thirteen is the fifth and final 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.