The Lighthouse Auctioneer

In a converted lighthouse outside Oostende, Harrow & Tidel auctions the things people abandon during disasters: a salt-stiffened coat, a wedding ring left in a lifeboat, a suitcase too heavy to carry. Each lot arrives with a documented release.

Jonas Meijer writes those histories for the catalogue. He also hears what the paperwork cannot hold: the instant an object left someone's hand.

Then he opens Lot 441, a child's red boot recovered after the sinking of the MV Kestrel. Its provenance is legally complete. Online bidding is already climbing. But the child's mother is still searching for it, and the release Jonas hears does not match the story attached to the lot.

With the auction approaching, Jonas traces the boot backward through a beach volunteer, a ferry survivor, an insurer, and signatures designed to make abandonment look final. Every account is plausible. None is whole. The auction house insists that withdrawing it would threaten every lot it has ever sold.

If the hammer falls, the boot will disappear into a private collection and one family's last unanswered question will become someone else's property. To stop it, Jonas must prove that a catalogue can be accurate in every detail and still tell a devastating lie.

A salt-dark literary thriller about grief, provenance, and the moral cost of turning what was lost into something that can be owned.