Honest Wear

A genuine thing is all of a piece. It agrees with itself. A fake argues — and if you're quiet enough, you can hear the argument.

Frances Hale can hear it. Once a rising star at a New York auction house, Frankie had a rare gift for reading the secret history hidden inside other people's treasures — and one honest word too many cost her the career she loved. Now she keeps her late father's antiques shop in sleepy Wexford Falls, with his brass loupe worn smooth in her apron pocket and a dignified basset hound named Hepplewhite asleep by the stove. She has kept her head down for two years. Down is a fine place to keep it.

Then a letter arrives from a woman three weeks dead. Adelaide Ottershaw — last of the town's vanished cabinetmaking dynasty — has named Frankie, and Frankie alone, to catalogue the contents of Heronwood before the fancy Boston auctioneers can crate it all away. Not to value it. To read it. There is something in this house, the old woman writes, that is not what it appears to be. I should like one honest eye on it before the vans come.

At the estate, Frankie finds dust and faded grandeur — and the beloved old foreman dead at the foot of his workshop ladder. An accident, everyone agrees. Everyone but Frankie. The tools hang on the wrong pegs. A careful man had no reason to climb. And a missing brooch lies just so, like bait.

Then her father's loupe reveals the unthinkable: the family's priceless masterpiece is a flawless fake. The real treasure was never stolen, only hidden — behind a secret stitched into a child's sampler and sealed in a cradle's forgotten drawer. To find it, Frankie must doubt the gentlest, most trusted soul in town.

Cozy, warm, and quietly wise, Honest Wear is a mystery about the truths that objects keep — and the ones people would kill to bury.

Lift the loupe. Read the truth for yourself.