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The Last Appraisal: A Senior Sleuth Cozy Mystery
Paperback
Series: Sunset Village Mystery Club, Book 5
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 29 2026
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When a California coastal painting is donated to Sunset Village's common room following the death of a long-term resident, Rose Nakamura stands in front of it for fourteen minutes and recognises what it is:
the work of James Larkin Cord, a Carmel Impressionist who died in 1962 and whose finest paintings disappeared from the record almost immediately after his death.What follows is the story of a sixty-year fraud - and the people who finally have the tools to prove it.
For thirty-seven years, Cord's daughter Cecily has been saying the right thing in the wrong rooms. Two probate dismissals. A gallerist who controlled the documentation. An estate quietly dispersed through a San Francisco gallery as California coastal unknowns, sold at a fraction of their value, the provenance deliberately designed to hold no trace.
Retired corporate lawyer Arthur Bennett has spent his career reading title chains. Retired librarian Margaret Ellis has spent hers building records that hold. Retired LAPD detective Frank Delgado understands the architecture of a fraud that has been running for forty years. And Evelyn Marsh - former federal judge, Arthur's chess correspondent, arriving at Sunset Village with a cat named Precedent and a 1974 deed of gift she found in a federal case archive - has the legal framework to make it matter.
The Last Appraisal is the fifth book in the Sunset Village Mystery Club series: a novel about late-life expertise, the patience required by justice, and the specific satisfaction of a record finally set right.
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