Jewel Mysteries, from a Dealer's Note Book

In the backrooms of London's finest jewelers, a dealer of questionable reputation recounts ten tales of obsession, deception, and glittering violence. This isn't your grandmother's detective fiction. Our narrator knows where the bodies are buried because he may have helped dig some of them. Each story unfolds around a precious stone - the necklace of green diamonds that drives a man to madness, the rubies whose value ripens like blood on a man's hands. Pemberton, writing in the golden age before the genre had rules, delivers something stranger and darker than simple whodunits. The dealer's perspective gives these stories a morally compromised edge, as if we're reading confessions rather than cases. For readers who prefer their mysteries wrapped in velvet and shadow, with a narrator whose trustworthiness is as uncertain as the gems are brilliant.