The Odd Job

Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn are a most unusual pair of married art detectives – she’s a modern Boston Brahmin with a gift for deduction; he’s an errant rescuer of stolen masterpieces. But this time Max is off to Argentina to recover two priceless Watteaus, and Sarah is on her own in…The Odd Job. For nearly a century, the elegant Wilkins Museum has been a haven for a private collection of classic artwork – and a few expertly crafted fakes. Funded and overseen by the city’s elite, the museum has been mismanaged by greedy trustees and picked over by thieves. Now Dolores Tawne, the administrator of the Wilkins and a talented art forger in her own right, lies dead in the museum’s palazzo, stabbed with an antique hatpin. When the murder weapon turns up in the Bittersohns’ office, and a phony obituary detailing Sarah’s demise is planted in the Boston Globe, Sarah doesn’t know if it’s a sick joke or a warning. Then Sarah unexpectedly becomes the dead woman’s executrix and is forced to carry out Dolores’s macabre last wishes: to have her ashes scattered on the very spot where she was murdered. From the museum’s priggish chairman of the board of trustees and his newly resculpted wife to its ineffectual and possibly insecure security guard, Sarah is surrounded by feuding eccentrics and outlandish clues where nothing is quite what it seems. Here she must distinguish between the counterfeit and the true … before a twisted scheme closes in and adds Sarah’s life to someone’s deadly collection.