DEATH, DIAMONDS, AND DECEPTION

A chance observation at a fancy ball exposes embezzlement, scandal, and murder.

Prudence MacKenzie has little interest in the social prominence that is hers by birth. But she reckons without her redoubtable aunt, the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, an American “dollar princess” who exchanged family money for a title. Lady Rotherton insists on stuffing Prudence into a Worth gown and dragging her to the first Assembly Ball of the New York season, but Prudence goes only on the condition that her business partner, ex–Confederate officer and ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter, escort her. At the ball, Lady Rotherton spots paste fakes among real diamonds once intended for Marie Antoinette and now in a necklace adorning the neck of Lena De Vries, the wife of a wealthy financier. William De Vries hires the two-person firm of Hunter and Mackenzie, Investigative Law, to inquire discreetly about the missing gems. A network of street urchins, dedicated servants, and former Pinks point Prudence and Geoffrey toward a gem cutter whom they find dead in his jewelry store. A second murder and a suicide later, the search for the missing diamonds makes a suspect of Lena’s son, a gambler and drunkard whose sorry misadventures lead to tragedy, a desperate escape attempt, and an emotional cliffhanger deferred until at least the next installment.

Simpson takes her unconventional duo from the upper crust to the lowest dregs of New York society in the Gilded Age.