Omus Jones spent thirty-one years as a detective inspector with Bristol CID. Now he runs a one-man investigation agency from a converted warehouse on the harbour, lives in a flat above a chip shop in the Severn-side village of Severn Pill, drives a bright orange 1971 Bond Bug, eats anchovies from the tin every other afternoon, and talks to machines that never answer. His specialism found him rather than the reverse: he authenticates things. Cars, books, whisky, paintings, violins, maps — every world where beauty is priced and a small circle of experts decides what is genuine. His method rests on two questions he has asked his whole life: Who made this? and Who benefits?
Each book takes him into a different authenticity market, and each fraud turns out to be the same fraud wearing different clothes: somewhere between the famous name on the object and the anonymous hand that made it, someone has monetised the gap. The villains are rarely monsters. They are people who wanted a thing to be real — or wanted to go on being right — and stopped looking. The series' deep subject is the distance between the provable and the true: what a court can convict, versus what only the guilty ever know. And before the last page of every book, the forgotten maker — the craftsman, the ghostwriter, the student, the unsigned hand — gets their name back.