The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder

​Freya Lockwood lives in London and receives news from her distraught Aunt Carole that her former mentor, the antiques dealer Arthur Crockleford, has died suddenly. It’s been twenty years since Freya cut herself off from Arthur following a tragic incident while they were working in Cairo. She blames him and in spite of his death finds it difficult to forgive him for what he did. Freya’s marriage is at an end, her only daughter lives in America and her home is up for sale. She has nowhere to go and gives in when Carole persuades her to return to her Suffolk village for the funeral.

Once there, she is faced with a series of mysteries, shocked that it is beginning to look like Arthur was murdered. A few days prior to his death, he wrote a will leaving his business jointly to her and Carole, encouraging Freya to return to the antique trade as a verifier. He has also written a cryptic letter with various clues that allude to what happened in Cairo, that Freya and Carole must follow his instructions to finally discover the truth about the seamy side of the antique trade in which he’s been involved.

All of this is a promising plot, and should appeal to anyone with a passing interest in the wheeling and dealing of antiques and the black market in forgeries, but the rambling execution of it leaves much to be desired.

Carole has the more distinctive personality but Freya’s attitude doesn’t make her particularly appealing. There is a cast of another half-dozen or so one-dimensional characters that are up to no good yet none of them leap off the page, and it is easy to get them mixed up. There’s a feeble attempt by Carole to interest Freya romantically in one of them that goes nowhere and is pointless.

Although this is primarily Freya’s first-person story, there are also chapters featuring Carole in the third person and fragmentary chapters with the points of view of other characters that pretty much give the game away and would have been better left out to intensify the mystery factor.

The editing is woeful, with constant repetition of facts and some glaring errors, e.g. at the funeral on page 43, when Freya asks about one of the pall-bearers, Carole tells her that he is Harry, Arthur’s assistant, and on page 116, Carole mentions checking on her dog Harley who’s been looked after by Harry. Freya says ‘I don’t understand. Who’s Harry?’ No, I don’t understand either. A big mistake too many writers make is having similar names for their characters – and human names for dogs – and thus errors like this can get easily overlooked.

The author is a member of a family well-known in the antique world and I do commend her for the interesting idea and a valiant effort that would have been so much better with tougher, rigorous editing. Apparently there is a sequel on the way. I hope it is an improvement.
 
Two stars.
 
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