I own Another Man’s Treasure Estate Sales, and “estate” implies dead. But you don’t have to be deceased to use my services. I also sell off the accumulated possessions of a lifetime for downsizing seniors or executives suddenly transferred to Gambia or Tajikistan.
Normally, my days are filled with selling antique furniture, jewelry, and vintage designer clothes. My assistants, Ty and Donna, help me with the smaller collectibles: Fiestaware, Depression Glass, and Bakelite. But I’ve also found buyers for some pretty bizarre things in the houses I clear out: a taxidermied Asian tiger, Victorian mourning art made from the hair of dead children, and don’t get me started on the Lost in Space lunchbox that sold for five hundred bucks.
But nothing in my years of running estate sales has prepared me for what I find in the house of Cordelia Dean. If you’re of a certain age, you might remember her—she was the star reporter for Bass Line magazine, Rolling Stone’s biggest competitor back in the day. After touring the world writing about rock royalty like Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac, poor Cordy is washed up and broke in a wildly colorful house in Palmyrton, NJ. But once I sell the original, handwritten lyrics of an iconic rock ballad that I found buried in a box in her spare room, Cordy is flush with cash and in the limelight again.
Unfortunately, money and fame are a dangerous combination that leads to murder. Now I find myself pulled into a mystery that might re-write the history of rock. . .and get me and my staff killed!
Rock Bottom Treasure is the seventh book in the “Palmyrton Estate Sale” traditional mystery series, released December 7, 2020.
Cordelia Dean danced in the rain at Woodstock, drank with Jimi Hendrix in Paris, practiced yoga with John and Yoko at the Dakota, shared a room with Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel.
Or so she says.
Now Cordy Dean is a washed-up rock journalist living off Social Security in a crumbling house in Palmyrton, NJ. Estate sale organizer Audrey Nealon must sift through Cordy’s trove of rock memorabilia and find some saleable items to keep the aging hippie solvent.
The collector’s items Cordy boasts about might be figments of her imagination…or might be valuable enough to kill for.
When a man turns up murdered in Palmyrton, Audrey discovers the freaks and misfits who surround Cordy aren’t as harmless as she thought. And her search for rock and roll treasure takes on new intensity. Because the objects that lie concealed in Cordy’s house just might rewrite the cultural history of the seventies.
Everyone knows history is written by the winners.
After the losers get killed.
Meet the author
S.W. Hubbard writes the kinds of mysteries she loves to read: twisty, believable, full of complex characters, and highlighted with sly humor. She is the author of the Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series and the Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series, as well as the Life in Palmyrton women’s fiction series. She lives in Morristown, NJ with her husband and her squirrel-chasing dog, Libby. She LOVES book groups and would be happy to visit yours in person (in NJ) or via Skype. Visit her website at swhubbard.net.
All comments are welcomed.
I’d love to have the opportunity to read this author’s books. UNFORTUNATELY not one of the local county library systems has anything this author wrote.
This is an indie pub book which is probably why the book is not in the library system.