An I.d.b. in South Africa

1888. The Kimberley Diamond Fields. Where fortunes are made in a single transaction and destroyed just as quickly. The novel opens in a Cape Town opera house, where the glittering audience discusses the lower impulses of human nature while a marked diamond passes between hands that will soon ruin a man. At its center stands Dainty Laure, a woman of striking beauty and ambiguous heritage, married to a man who may or may not know the true sources of her past. The I.D.B. of the title is the Illicit Diamond Buyer, and in this morally bankrupt colonial society, everyone is either buying, selling, or pretending not to see. When that marked diamond surfaces in the possession of Count Telfus, the carefully constructed world of Kimberley society begins to crack, and Dainty must navigate friendships, betrayals, and the seductive danger of wealth she cannot quite trust. Sheldon writes with sharp-eyed precision about the performance of respectability in a frontier town built on stolen land and blood diamonds. This is a novel about identity in a world that insists on categories, and the high cost of passing in a society that prizes appearance above all else.