Dead Weight

In 1942, an Antwerp family named Hartmann lost everything. Eighty years later, their granddaughter Eva is still waiting for it back.

Rowan Voss is an independent antique picker who notices the wrong things in the right order. At a provincial Belgian auction, they find a small silver salt cellar — excellent provenance, excellent chasing, and a weight that isn’t quite right. The deeper Rowan digs, the larger the fraud becomes: high-quality forgeries, nine looted families, and a Russian oligarch’s art advisor who is very good at lying and very bad at being wrong.

Then the auction dealer turns up dead, and obsession becomes something that could get Rowan killed.

This story has 3 chapters featured on this site, containing a total of 6,499 words.