Bright as New Copper

Petra Woods can spot a fake the instant it touches her hand. That gift is the only reason her cousin Wendy trusts her with the truth: someone is flooding the Verde Valley's galleries with convincing counterfeits of Wendy's newly famous silverwork, undercutting her prices and threatening to unravel a reputation she's only just started to build.

Petra parks her RV outside the historic mining town of Jerome, Arizona, a place too steep and too narrow for anything her size, and starts working the galleries one by one, comparing pieces stone by stone. But the deeper she looks, the more it's clear this isn't a lone forger with a good eye. Someone with real skill, real patience, and intimate knowledge of the old mine tunnels threading beneath the town has built something far more organized.

When her cat Sedona wanders off near the abandoned Cleopatra Mine, unbothered as always, Petra follows her into eighty-eight miles of forgotten passageways, and finds more than she bargained for. Old relics from a Prohibition-era still. Signs of quiet, unofficial shelter that has nothing to do with counterfeits at all. And finally, sixty yards in, a workspace full of resin, molds, and reference photographs that connects every fake piece back to one man hiding in plain sight.

With a century of ghost stories providing the perfect cover, Petra has to prove what's real before Wendy loses everything she's worked for, and before the tunnels swallow the truth for good.