Happenstance wasn't a word that crept into Hugo Braithwaite's vocabulary. He tended to find that things happened in patterns and spirals and when his young assistant, Carly Jones, discovered a valuable wood carving at a local car-boot sale it was only natural that there was going to be some sinister follow-on.

"Bloody hell!" came the response from the new addition to the team "And I thought the antiques business was all refined folk selling Georgian silver and Chinese ginger jars. Now I find it's constant murder, art fraud, money laundering, violent assault, stolen church silver ... is there anything else you're not telling me?"

The Hugo Braithwaite Mysteries are set in the shadowy world of antiques and fine art, where villains rub shoulders with millionaires in grand country houses and seedy back streets. Hugo Braithwaite is an antiques dealer and acknowledged authority on British watercolours, a talent which often throws him into the limelight of popular television to help sate the public's thirst for discovering valuable family heirlooms and treasures in the attic. On the down side, it is also a murky realm of fakes, forgeries, felony ... and the occasional murder.