After the war, a dangerous legacy...

London in 1947: Saskia Harper learns that she has inherited the house in which she grew up. The Seigneurie is set in a remote corner of Brittany, the Cornwall of France and for Saskia is a place of enchanted memories. Desperate to escape her troubled life in London she sets out to claim it. But when she arrives at the ancient manor house, she finds that her inheritance is fiercely disputed. Someone else claims to be the true owner, and all seems lost.

Reeling, Saskia is thrown into a chance encounter with a mysterious yet charismatic stranger, Jean-Jacques Sebastien, who has come to Brittany on a desperate quest of his own. Jean-Jacques drags her into the dangerous complexities of post-occupation France, where the wounds of the war have barely begun to heal, and it soon emerges that they have business in common, and far more besides. But as she opens her heart to him, she finds herself struggling to save him from his own dark past.

The True Value of Pearls is an emotional, romantic suspense novel in the tradition of Mary Stewart. Harriet Smart is the author of the acclaimed series of historical crime novels, The Northminster Mysteries.