Never Judge a Book by Its Cover

Lovejoy takes Charlotte to an Antiques Fair at Cambridge, where the elderly Doncaster sisters, who have financial problems, invite him to value their belongings. Among the family treasures he finds what seems to be a very rare Bible, a historic edition worth around twenty thousand pounds. The find looks like the answer to the sisters' prayers.

Then their brother, a Cambridge don, opposes the sale. The resistance triggers Lovejoy's professional suspicion, and he discovers the Bible is a fake. Mischief is at play inside the family's treasures, and the question becomes who planted the fraud and why. Meanwhile Beth Taylor is having troubles of her own: her father wants her to leave Lovejoy Antiques and find something better, and the quiet pressure of that runs under the whole episode. Richard Briers, the star of The Good Life, plays the disapproving don, and Rudolph Walker, later a fixture of EastEnders as Patrick Trueman, is also in the cast. James Ellis, best remembered from Z Cars, completes a guest list full of familiar television faces. The Cambridge setting is used for more than scenery: a fake Bible sold against a don's objections needs a college town to feel properly scandalous, and the show leans on that.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Colin Shindler wrote it, Jim Hill directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, Caroline Langrishe is Charlotte Cavendish, Diane Parish is Beth Taylor, and Malcolm Tierney is Charlie Gimbert. Richard Briers plays Raymond Doncaster, the don, James Ellis is Niall Sheehan, Rudolph Walker is Earl Taylor, Barbara Hicks is Hope Doncaster, and Kathleen Worth is Faith Doncaster.

The episode is a reminder that even when investigating material objects, the greatest mysteries reside in the complicated relationships of the people who claim to own them. A fake Bible, a disapproving brother, and a father who wants his daughter out of the trade: nobody in this story is quite what the cover promises, and that is exactly the point.