An art dealer in his twenties, Jimmy LaGrange, is found beaten to death in his apartment just after the find of his life has been consigned to auction. Word spreads at a New York auction house and two ladies, Coleman and Dinah Greene, speculate sadly as to what could have gone wrong and whether it had any connection to art. Coleman has a problem: she runs a magazine called 'Art Smart', but many of their ideas are being stolen by other titles. She doesn't want to tell her cousin Dinah, who has her own struggle to keep an art gallery open, and she fears the leak is one of her two longest-standing staff members.

RESTRIKE refers to a fine art print, later than the first edition. Dinah is well-versed in such matters and she snaps up a couple of items at auction, the buyers from MOMA and other museums having left after the star offering was sold. But Dinah can't hide her trepidation at her lack of trade, and her possessive husband doesn't want her to move to a better location. A new print museum in town seems a likely prospect and she tries to get an introduction to the man who wants to open it. An advisor on fine art to the police, Robert Mondelli, asks for a meeting with Coleman to discuss the connection between the dead art dealer and her gallery. Since Jimmy hadn't owned the valuable work he consigned to sale, who did? Coleman has more questions than answers, and the police think it was a date gone wrong, but Coleman is sure that the timing of Jimmy's death is too much of a coincidence.

There's lots of good detail about the middle-ground art world; the prints by lesser-known women from the early 1900s which find buyers, the work of identification and authentication when a discovery is made. The two Greene girls meanwhile come across as very real women, picking their way through the minefield of business and relationships, saddened that two weeks after Jimmy's death he has almost been forgotten by the fast-moving city crowd.

The side issues keep us reading and the mystery deepens. Reba White Williams has done a skillful job with this tale and the connections keep being made right to the end. RESTRIKE is a detailed mystery for art lovers and people who enjoy learning something new.