The Carnforth Double — Allan Jones

Two years after an unsolved major art heist in London at a merchant bank, a prisoner in Rome sends a message to the Metropolitan Police. He is prepared to talk about a sentencing deal for information about the bank robbery. The Met is interested; it was not just that three paintings were stolen, two of them near-priceless canvases by the ‘horse artist' George Stubbs. It was also a violent robbery in which a family was terrified, the mother beaten and the father kidnapped.

Detective Sergeant Catrin Sayer of the Art Crime Unit, Metropolitan Police has returned from a supposedly routine ‘diplomatic relations' assignment in Malaysia, one that went disastrously wrong. She finds herself assigned to the bank robbery now that it has developed a new lead. Her proposal to ensnare the perpetrators is unusual, to say the least. She wants to focus on the obscure third painting stolen, a portrait from the mid-eighteenth century of a farmer's wife, Mrs. Rosalind Heaton of Carnforth, Lancashire, painted by an unknown artist called Hamlet Winstanley.

And if that's not enough for Sayer, she has to worry about whether or not a Triad gang now wants her dead, even if she has left Malaysia…

The Carnforth Double… the fourth Catrin Sayer mystery.