JL Collins Publishing LLC
JL Collins Publishing LLC
on Books.by
The antiques remember everything. They just can’t tell you when.

The Provenance Problem

The antiques in Addie Wrent’s shop witnessed a murder. Two of them, actually — sixty years apart, the same room, the same hour. Her new Victorian desk remembers both and can’t tell which is which. With a historian dead in the archive and her late great-aunt’s handwriting turning up where it can’t be, Addie has a spreadsheet, a gramophone, and a very bad feeling about the nicest family in town. Book Two of the Crabapple Antiques Mysteries.

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About the Book

Six weeks after a killer was led out of her shop, Adelaide Wrent has exactly the quiet she wanted: a working antique store, a town that has gone back to minding its own business, and a brand-new Victorian desk that reorganizes her filing while she sleeps.
Then the desk lays a sixty-year-old index card across her morning receipts. Then a visiting historian is found dead in the Kettlebrook archive — at 9:40 at night, at the foot of a ladder, exactly the way the town’s first archivist died sixty years before. And then Addie notices that a brass clock she can’t account for carries her late great-aunt’s handwriting on a piece it should never have touched.
The desk witnessed both deaths. The trouble is, it can’t tell the decades apart — it sorts 1966 and last week into the same neat stack and waits, with infinite patience, for Addie to separate the truth from itself. To read it she’ll need Gerald’s funeral aria, the Professor’s least helpful question, a phone that keeps dialing a number that no longer exists, and the one man in town who alphabetizes for love.
What she finds is a forgery a hundred and forty years deep, a great-aunt who was never collecting antiques at all, and a beloved family who have struck the same hour twice rather than let anyone look too closely.
Part cozy mystery, part slow-burn romance, all heart — THE PROVENANCE PROBLEM is Book Two of the Crabapple Antiques Mysteries.
• Cozy paranormal mystery · small-town Vermont
• Sweet closed-door slow burn (first kiss: Book Four — yes, still)
• A complete mystery in every book; a series arc that rewards staying
• For fans of Juliet Blackwell, Sofie Ryan, and Heather Blake

The Author

JL Collins Publishing LLC

JL Collins Publishing LLC

"Several voices. One promise: books worth staying up too late for."

JL Collins Publishing is a small independent press built by storytellers, for readers. Under one roof you'll find several distinct voices — thrillers that won't let you sleep, romance and romantasy that pull you under, and nonfiction that actually meets you where you are. Different names, one promise: books worth staying up too late for. Find the voice that's yours and start reading.

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