Description

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Life on a Caribbean island brings both pleasures and pitfalls. For Elaine Carpelan, there's a comfortable place for her on the Danish Caribbean island of King Christian. Her love of old and exquisite items blends well with her career as an antiques appraiser and manager of a small auction house where she's worked with the owner Tom Haskin for the last ten years.

With her African Gray parrot Barley and her mutt Zeke, Elaine relishes island life and the surprises each day brings-both on and off the job. She is well aware that auctions have drama, but when an alligator crashes one of her auctions Elaine finds herself fodder for the local newspaper. Then there's the local furniture restorer who dies suspiciously and the fire at a recently restored historic home. Drugs are uncovered at another auction, while tourists continue to ignore the undertow warnings at a local beach.

Elaine hasn't thought about leaving this idyllic setting until Chay, a Londoner in his mid-sixties, offers her a lucrative business proposition. Elaine wonders if she can leave this tropical paradise and move to England. She remembers a friend telling her, "You take yourself with you wherever you go, you know.