About the book
Sera Vane knows how to read the things people leave behind. In her small shop beside a cathedral, she restores Victorian mourning jewellery, traces forgotten names and tries to earn enough to cover the debts left by a failed relationship.
A collection from the estate of Constance Elmore looks like a welcome opportunity: forty-seven pieces, carefully preserved, to be sold together. But as Sera catalogues the rings, hairwork and funeral cards, the same families keep appearing. Across eighty years, their fortunes turn on deaths recorded as accidents.
Constance lived to be a hundred and three. She left almost no account of her own life, yet she was close to the people commemorated in the collection. Sera begins to suspect that the objects were assembled to preserve something their official histories left out.
Her enquiries attract the attention of living descendants, and the pressure to stop grows. With her livelihood already precarious, Sera must decide how far she can trust the evidence in her hands—and what she owes to the woman who kept it.
The Antique Mourning Shop is an atmospheric Gothic mystery novella about mourning, family power and the difficulty of recovering a truth that no one wrote down.
