A brass seal. A stolen name. A hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old lie that refuses to stay buried.
When a battered brass seal turns up in a house clearance, Diana Hartley knows better than most that the quiet ones are dangerous. As Keeper of the Catalogue - a back-room archive of objects that remember what people would rather forget - she has learned to trust the cold that crawls off a thing with a secret.
The seal remembers a lie. A falsified birth, a child taken, a name pressed out of the record in a single drop of wax. And the frightened woman it was stolen from is still alive, eighty-one years old, and running out of time to be believed.
With her friends - a psychic who reads objects with her bare hands, an archivist whose photographs catch what the eye can't, and a policeman quietly discovering a gift of his own - Diana has a fortnight to prove a truth a powerful family has spent four generations burying. A grey shop cat, as usual, already knows how it ends.
The Forger's Seal is the third Hartley Catalogue Mystery: a slow-burn, cozy paranormal whodunit set in an English village, warm as a pot of tea and just a little haunted. Each book solves its own case - but the shop, the shelves, and the secrets carry on.
Perfect for readers who love: haunted-object and antique-shop mysteries, amateur sleuths in small English villages, a touch of magic without the gore, found-family warmth, and a clever cat who steals every scene.
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