Summary
A blood-bright ruby, ripped from the turban of a Mughal bride by a rapacious rajah, drifts like a cursed ember across two empires until it surfaces in a Bond-Street window under the custodianship of Sir John Garnett, whose domestic life is already unravelling—someone is filching diamonds from his wife’s dressing-table with the insolence of a stage magician. Enter James Brett, a private enquiry agent whose brain works like a clockwork chessboard; he prowls drawing-rooms, music-halls, and the underbellies of hansom cabs, only to discover that every glittering suspect—Russian spies posing as gem-buyers, society dandies with monocles as thick as treacle, even Lady Garnett herself—has a private ledger of desire. The jewel is finally slipped into a carton of violet creams, where its crimson heart pulses beneath layers of sugar and arsenic-laced irony, while loyalties switch faster than the flicker of a cinematograph shutter. By the time the Thames fog swallows the climactic struggle on a moonlit pier, the ruby has become a prism refracting colonial guilt, marital deceit, and the vertigo of modernity itself.
Synopsis
The world's finest ruby was stolen from the bride of Prince Kassim's great-grandfather several generations ago in India by a marauding rajah. It's now several decades later and the British have conquered India, and one day the ruby shows up for sale by a wealthy London jeweler, Sir John Garnett. Garnett has his own problems--there have been a rash of thefts of his wife's jewels, and he hires a private detective named James Brett to investigate. An agent for the Russian czar expresses interest in buying the ruby, but he's actually a member of a gang that specializes in jewel thefts and steals the ruby, hiding it in a box of chocolates belonging to Garnett's wife. Unbeknownst to Garnett, the jewel thieves and even Garnett's wife, she is actually involved in the theft of her jewels. Complications ensue.
