The Tenth Car

Some things are too beautiful to question. That's exactly the problem.

When hedge-fund manager Marcus Hartley unseals a carriage house on his crumbling Cornish estate, he finds something impossible under seventy years of dust: a car the world believed was lost forever — the most beautiful machine ever built, and worth a fortune to the man who can prove what it is.

The experts are called. The papers are signed. Eighteen million pounds changes hands.

And then the questions start.

Omus Jones is sixty-one, freshly and unwillingly retired, running a one-room agency above a Bristol chip shop and losing an argument with his coffee machine. He drives a bright orange three-wheeler, eats anchovies straight from the tin, and authenticates people the way other men authenticate cars — by paying attention to what they'd rather he didn't.

Hired to find out whether Hartley is a victim or something worse, Omus follows the trail from a Chelsea townhouse to a Mayfair vault to a flat in Paris — into a rarefied world where a handful of people decide what's real, and a great deal depends on nobody asking how they know.

Because the most dangerous thing in the world isn't a lie. It's a man who needs something to be true.

The Tenth Car is a quietly devastating mystery about craftsmanship, obsession, and the price of belief — and the first case for an investigator you'll want to follow home.

Julien St. James writes atmospheric crime and cross-cultural fiction about belonging, obsession, and the bargains we make with tradition. His work moves easily across borders - a habit, perhaps, of a life that never stayed in one place for long.Born in London and raised across four continents, he has lived and worked in the Netherlands and Sweden - the countries that shaped much of his crime writing - and on all four sides of the United States: Virginia in the east, Minnesota in the north, California in the west, and Texas in the south, where he has been based in Austin since 2015. That restless geography runs straight through his fiction: his debut, Perfect Attachment (2025), is a Nordic noir set in Sweden; Love Notes and Sticky Tape (2025) is a love story set in Japan; and The Tenth Car unfolds across the United Kingdom and France, following a reluctantly retired detective into a rarefied world where a handful of people decide what is real.He came to writing crime the way most people come to it - by reading a great deal of it, and then a great deal more. His shelves run to more than two hundred authors, from the golden-age puzzles of Agatha Christie to the cold spycraft of Len Deighton, the atmospheric British crime of Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves, and the patient procedurals of Michael Connelly. Influenced above all by Jo Nesbø and Jan Willem van de Wetering, he is drawn to the unshowy end of the genre: the patient investigator, the slow accumulation of detail, the moment a small human gesture gives everything away. He is interested less in who did it than in why - in the desires, loyalties, and inherited stories that lead ordinary people to extraordinary deceptions.