The Tenth Car

A lost masterpiece. The world’s leading expert says it is real. And eighteen million pounds say someone is lying.When a struggling hedge-fund manager finds a pre-war Delacroix, one of only ten ever built and missing since 1940, sealed in the carriage house of his crumbling Cornish estate, it looks like salvation. The world’s foremost authority authenticates it. A collector pays eighteen million pounds. Weeks later, a rival expert calls it a fake.Omus Jones is lately of the Avon and Somerset police and five months into the private investigation business he runs from a damp office on the Bristol harbourside, with a broken espresso machine and a tin of anchovies for company. His client, an insurer facing a ruinous claim, wants a single answer. Is the seller a fraud, or a victim?What Omus finds is a deception seventy years in the making. A forgery so beautiful it almost deserves to be real. And an expert whose sharpest weapon is the one thing nobody thinks to question: his authority. Paired with the precise and unsentimental DS Zennor Quince, Omus follows a paper trail from a Devon workshop to a flat in Paris, and learns that the most dangerous lies are the ones people tell themselves.The Tenth Car is a witty, intricate, fair-play mystery, the first to feature private investigator Omus Jones. For readers who love the wit and ingenuity of Anthony Horowitz, Richard Osman, Elly Griffiths, and Janice Hallett.