The Provenance

A looted violin surfaces fifty years on - flawless, costly, and quietly stripped of its name.

Eva Brandt is a provenance researcher, trained like a luthier to feel the joint that doesn't fit. When a fine Austrian violin comes up for a London spring sale - private collection, Switzerland, since 1950 - she sees at once what the clean catalogue line is built to hide. The instrument was made by Samuel Feld. It was confiscated in 1938. And the record that should prove it has been severed at the root.

Her search leads her to the last of the Felds, a woman of ninety who has kept an honest account for sixty years - and to the one entry it was never meant to survive. To free the violin, Eva must prove it was stolen. To prove it was stolen, she must prove the old woman did not sell it. And the old woman did.

From a London saleroom to a Zurich sitting room to the freeports where wealth is kept nameless in the dark, The Provenance is a novel about records and reckoning, good faith and its price, and the hardest kind of keeping: an account that refuses the clean story even when the clean story would set you free.

The Feld Story continues. Book One, The Violin Maker's Ledger (Vienna, 1938-1947), told how the account began. This second, standalone novel carries it into the present - where the law has a wall called good faith, and a stranger goes looking for the truth behind it.