The Christmas Forgery

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She can spot a fake at six feet. She never saw him leaving. Every Advent for ninety-five years, Edinburgh has queued to see the Wee Red Lassie — a girl in a scarlet cloak, singing on the frozen Nor' Loch in a painting from 1785 that hangs over one small gallery's fireplace every December. This year a ginger cat goes for a fiddler's bow, a tray of mulled wine goes over, and paintings conservator Isla Rennie takes the Lassie back to her studio to clean. Under the varnish, she finds that the city's favourite painting is a fake. The insurers send a loss adjuster to find out where the real one went. He is Euan Strachan — who walked out three weeks before their Christmas wedding seven years ago, leaving a note that said it isn't you, the same month Isla's evidence sent his father to prison for forgery. And the police already have a suspect. His father. Now there's a thistle hidden under the paint, a break-in at the studio, a charming chairman in a hurry to be paid, a London dealer with very cold eyes, and twenty-four days until a crate leaves Leith for Geneva. To find the painting, Isla will have to trust the one man she swore she never would again — and he will have to tell her, at last, why he left. The Christmas Forgery is a second-chance Christmas romance with a real mystery at its heart: a ceilidh band with an average age of seventy-six and a rule never to stop playing for anything short of fire, a gallery cat who hates everyone except the insurance man, a borrowed kilt four inches too short, and a big wheel that stops at the top at exactly the wrong moment. For readers who want: • A second chance built on a secret worth keeping, and worth telling • A real art-world mystery with fair clues, paint science and a deadline • Edinburgh at Christmas: the market, the Meadows, a ceilidh, Hogmanay on Calton Hill • A grandmother who plays the accordion like a weapon • A happy ending that is earned, not given A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not every villain is caught, and not everything that is saved comes back undamaged — but love wins, and the band never stops playing. Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language.