Category Archives: Crime

Why I Write Crime Fiction

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The best thing about writing crime fiction (mysteries and thrillers) is the endless font of ideas. Thieves are at work (the Louvre!), scams are abundant, surveillance is creepy, shenanigans run rampant. The damage people can do to each other and themselves seems endless. Writing my new destination thriller She Knew Too Much, I was able to take advantage of a number of societal aberrations: murder, theft, scamming of a high order, kidnapping, fake identity, weaknesses in the law enforcement establishment, and more. It takes place in Rome, which means the mafia can be part of the picture, along with Italy’s Byzantine law enforcement structure.

One of the greatest advantages an author has in putting together a mystery/thriller is that these stories typically deal with people who are at one of the most consequential times of their lives. There’s emotional intensity, fear and frustration. Risk. Drama. People are not necessarily at their best—or maybe they are. They learn things about their community, friends, family, partners, and themselves which sometimes they’d rather not know. It’s a time in their lives when what they do really matters. An important challenge for writers is to make the stakes matter to readers too.

A lot of writers play it safe and rely on worn-out plotlines. I read and review about 50 new crime/mystery/thriller books a year, and many of them still rely on genre clichés. Writers need to come up with something fresher than serial killers, gaslighting spouses, reunions of old friends where the secrets finally come out, and morally weary detectives with a divorce and a drinking problem. The ease with which an author can get sucked into those overdone plots is one of the cons.

Mystery stories are very popular (pro), so writers have to get their facts right—weapons, police procedure, geography and so on—which takes research (a con for some authors). Factual errors make a story lose credibility. At the same time, the author isn’t writing a textbook. No reader enjoys a big indigestible information dump. (The worst example I can think of was an author’s description of a weapon in which he used actual bullet points—not the shooting kind, the PowerPoint kind.) Recognizing the truly necessary details and artfully weaving them into the story is another of the writer’s challenges.

The need for research isn’t a con for me. Research is part of my process, and it always gives me ideas I would never have otherwise. In She Knew Too Much, I identified a small suburban town north of Rome where a gang member could hide. I found out (map research and street camera) that the town I’d chosen has a farmer’s market on Saturdays. Having the gang member visit that market, in full view of the street camera, became part of the story.

Another pro-might-be-con is the ubiquity of cell phones, street cameras (in some places), and information technology. Some stories or TV mysteries could be solved and trouble avoided if characters would just make a phone call. Perhaps this explains the popularity of setting stories a few decades—even centuries—ago. It avoids the technology complication but opens up significant new research challenges. Genie Clarke, the main character in She Knew Too Much, has to go completely off social media to keep the gangsters from tracking her. As a travel blogger with an active online presence, she feels even more disconnected from her usual world.

That’s her environment, and that’s part of the story. You can order it here from:
Bookshop.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

Meet Amit Madoor . . .

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When reading my new novel She Knew Too Much for the umpteenth time–not as a Word document this time, but as a “real book” for proofreading–I was struck again by how much I liked not just the main characters, but also the secondary ones.

One of my favorites has always been Amit Madoor, the mafia’s Moroccan fence. He has a way of getting top dollar for stolen goods, and I was so fascinated by how his career might have started, I wrote far too much! I took out the passages not essential to the novel and turned them into a standalone short story, with its own arc and resolution, which takes place almost thirty years before the novel.

It involves a case that has always fascinated me–the still (in real life) unsolved robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The precious artworks stolen constitute the largest property theft in history, and they have never been recovered. Experts say that stealing artworks is child’s play next to trying to dispose of them afterward. That’s where Madoor excels.

In my short story, “Above Suspicion,” published in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, I hewed carefully to the exact details of the crime. Of course, I invented the thieves, but I think my theory about who they might have been and why they’ve never been caught holds up. You can read it here!

Meanwhile, to learn about Amit Madoor’s vital role in the plot threatening American travel writer Genie Clarke, read She Knew Too Much, available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other notable booksellers. The novel takes place in Rome, where Madoor now lives, and involves a handsome Italian police detective and a whole cast of intriguing characters.

Meet Oliver Harmon . . .

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Oliver Harmon, a secondary character in my new Italy-based thriller She Knew Too Much, was particularly fun to write. A well-meaning Anglican priest, he’s vitally important in the first chapter when he interrupts a violent attack on Genie Clarke, the novel’s main character. From there on, he appears intermittently, but again is crucial in the climax.

What I enjoyed about writing him is he’s one of those people—and we all have known someone like this—who talks on and on, with only the slenderest connection between topics. He’s a walking run-on sentence. Yet, he’s also a particular friend of the second-most important character in the story, Leo Angelini, chief detective of Rome’s Polizia di Stato.

Writers are challenged to make their characters both interesting and believable. Real people, not cardboard cutouts. For Harmon, I tried to think what the preoccupations would be of someone like that, transplanted from his home country, who’s a not-perfect fit with his superiors, someone whose parishioners might find a wee bit tiresome, but good-hearted at the core. Genie actually find him quite entertaining, and she needs the kind of lift to the spirits he provides as she goes up against some of the most dangerous criminals in the city.

If you’d like to read a bit more about Oliver Harmon—more than you’ll actually even find in the book, you can find the story here.

She Knew Too Much will be published February 15, and is available for preorder on Amazon now. Enjoy them both!

Vicarious Adventures for the Snowbound

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If the impulse to hibernate becomes just too strong over the next two weeks, here are two adventures stories that will get that sluggish body moving again—of course, you’ll have to occupy a chair to read them.

Come and Get Her by Bruce Conord

I raced through the pages of Bruce Conord’s new suspense thriller Come and Get Her to find out what deadly hazard would our hero, Jesse Arroyo, face next and whether he’d finally take one risk too many. His first-person story starts with a gripper. Jesse says it’s “the call that no parent should receive.” In the middle of the night, his ex-girlfriend Debi is on the phone telling him their daughter Sheri is missing. She and two friends crossed the Texas border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to visit a night club. Leaving late, they were kidnapped, but one of the girls escaped and gave the police in Laredo, Texas, the sketchy details.

Sheri was the result of a one-night stand some twenty years earlier, and a longer-term relationship between Jesse and Debi proved impossible: too much social distance. Jesse joined the Army, buried himself in Afghanistan and the clandestine services for the better part of two decades, and communication between him and Debi is rare.

The Laredo police and the FBI are upbeat about Sheri’s safety and confident of the cooperation of the Nuevo Laredo authorities. They are sure a ransom demand will come, and if the family pays it, which of course Debi’s wealthy father will, Sheri will be set free. Jesse is far less optimistic. Nuevo Laredo is wracked by drug cartel violence, and two blonde Americans are prime targets for trafficking. He’s not counting on help from the Mexican police, who are too often in cahoots with the cartels. Just as bad, he doesn’t trust Debi’s dad to pay up.

Conord writes convincingly about the effects on Jesse of twenty years’ operating in a hostile environment where trust was scant on the ground, unlike regrets, which were plentiful. When Jesse goes after Sheri himself, you know this is a long-shot endeavor, even for someone with his skills and savvy.

Unlike Don Winslow’s The Cartel and The Border, the book doesn’t tackle head-on the problems created by the drugs, guns, and money sloshing back and forth across the US-Mexican border. Yet, that reality is here and makes the story feel all-too-real. That impression is aided by Conord’s portrayal of the intransigent attitudes and tactics of US immigration and border patrol personnel. The action is non-stop, and the frustrations baked into the system are acute, so that, by the last page, you may feel you need a long winter’s nap. Exciting!

The Hunted by Steven Max Russo

Another nail-biting adventure is the new thriller The Hunted by Steven Max Russo. I’ve liked his previous books, The Debt Collector and The Dead Don’t Sleep for his engaging characters and clever plots. The Hunted does not disappoint.

Ophelia Harris, a former CIA analyst working in Afghanistan for the private security firm GSG (think Blackwater), was the only survivor of an operation that went south in Afghanistan. She escaped with, worth mentioning, two suitcases stuffed with cash. What she learned before the shooting started was that the Americans were being ambushed, something only someone on the inside at the company could have engineered. Because she escaped, she knows the suspicions point to her, and she’s on the run.

Because GSG is a security operation and has an inside track with military and espionage agencies, it has the resources to find her, wherever she hides. And has. First in Florida and now, as the story opens, in New Jersey. What the company’s leaders also have is motivation, not just because they suspect her of betraying her team, but also because, unbeknownst to Ophelia, one of the Americans killed in the operation was the boss’s son.

A chance meeting of someone from Afghanistan leads to an uneasy partnership in which Ophelia and former Army Ranger Austin Medford flee across Pennsylvania. The head of GSG and two of his crack assassins are hard on their heels. The fugitives have skill and nerve on their side, while their antagonists have all that, plus virtually unlimited access to surveillance technology. It’s a crackerjack story that like Come and Get Her, leaves you breathless.

My new thriller, She Knew Too Much, is on sale now (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). An American travel writer on assignment in Rome stumbles on deadly information.

Jenny Kidd by Laury A. Egan

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Need to escape from this gloomy January weather? How about a vacation in sunny Italy—Venice to be exact. In her new book, Jenny Kidd, author Laury A. Egan recreates La Serenissima so believably, you’ll be surprised when you look up from her pages and discover it’s still the middle of winter!

Jenny is visiting Venice in order to pursue her desire to become painter and, it’s fair to say, to escape her overbearing father in America. Though she’s twenty-five, he’s convinced she shouldn’t be so far away, unsupervised, much less pursuing a career in the arts that is most likely to come to nothing. So he believes. And tells her, repeatedly.

At a gallery visit, she meets another young woman with an odd British accent and sketchy details, Randi Carroll. Randi is congenial but overly familiar—flirtatious actually—and tells Jenny about a costume party planned for that evening. The parties are held once a month at the palazzo of the wealthy Barbon family. Jenny decides to go, rents a costume, and it’s an unsettling, lavishly described event.

The guests don’t remove their masks, and she can’t tell if she’s dancing with a man or a woman. Having too many drinks doesn’t help. She does dance with one unmasked person, a beautiful woman wearing a distinctive rose-colored satin gown. Dancing with her is surprisingly sexy. This reaction, after the flirtatiousness of Randi unsettle Jenny.

In a day or two, she has occasion to meet the costume party hosts, Caterina Barbon and her younger brother, Sebatiano. Caterina is exceptionally beautiful, and she and Jenny agree she should paint Caterina’s portrait. To her delight, it’s turning out quite well. Through Caterina’s many connections, Jenny meets a Venetian art dealer who wants to see more of her work. Her excitement over these promising new friendships and career developments—and her determination to not give in to her father’s worldview—outweigh what, in other circumstances, might be natural caution. In fact, she ignores the warning signs: her flat has been robbed and, much worse, the delectable woman in the rose satin gown has turned up dead, floating in the lagoon.

You may think Jenny’s father’s judgment is not so off-base when she takes up residence with the seductive and aristocratic Barbon siblings, who turn out to be pansexual. Surprising herself, she and Caterina begin a relationship, and it isn’t until she realizes she cannot leave the house—bars on the windows, locked doors, that her suspicions start to grow. From there on, the book takes on a heightened emotional intensity and unexpected twists that will leave you breathless.

The sexual energy in Egan’s work is undeniable. And she’s not afraid to include characters who are complex and diverse. I’ve read four of her books and find that she doesn’t add a particular trait because it might be trendy, her characters are fully rounded.

And, I note that the cover of the first of her thrillers I read, The Psychologist’s Shadow, featured several elaborate Venetian carnival masks. Thinking about these four books, the idea of masks is a very apt theme for her work. You’ll be hoping Jenny can see behind them in time.

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

You’ll receive my “best of the best” recommendations for books, tv, movies, travel (sometimes), and publishing news in my mercifully short quarterly newsletter. Sign up with this link (you’ll be sent an email; be sure to confirm). Enjoy!

The Lizard by Dominic Stansberry

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Domenic Stansberry’s new noir mystery takes it slow, unraveling in beautiful prose the confounding situation its protagonist, political ghostwriter SE Reynolds. Stansberry—who hasn’t published a novel in almost a decade—has won numerous prizes, including an Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America) and a Hammett Prize for his past books.

The Lizard isn’t a typical thriller that keeps the action pulsing and the pages flying. Instead, Reynolds is caught in a net that ever-so-slowly tightens around him. When the book begins, he’s already on the run in a desolate sector of Southern California. It’s La Bahia, a town worn out and on its last legs. Just like the old Hotel La Bahia, destined for the wrecking ball. Just like Reynolds himself? Why anyone would go to this godforsaken place, willingly, is another mystery, yet someone may have followed him there. Or is his paranoia acting up?

Reynolds’s trouble started when a New York literary agent called to persuade him to help out an old friend—Max Seeghurs, another former investigative reporter—who’s supposed to be writing a book about a defunct New Mexico retreat called Sundial. Sundial was a popular destination for people on the make financially, politically, or in Hollywood. Sex and drugs. Alas, Sundial’s owner and his twenty-something son both died under dubious circumstances, the retreat closed down, and Seeghurs wants to pull the band-aid off. Expose the rot. But Seeghurs is having trouble pulling the book together; maybe Reynolds can be his manuscript doctor.

Reynolds isn’t keen on this potential assignment because Seeghurs is notoriously difficult to work with. And, because the last time they met up a couple of years back in Miscoulga, Nebraska, Reynolds had an affair with Seeghurs’s wife, now his ex-wife. But Reynolds’s latest candidate is not committing to hiring him, the money is attractive, and he finally agrees.

It takes some effort to track Seeghurs down out somewhere near the ocean on Coney Island. It’s not an easy thing finding him, the landlord hasn’t been paid and isn’t happy about it. But Reynolds persists and finds Seeghurs, all right. Dead. Trying to find out what happened takes him back to Miscoulga and eventually to the crumbling Hotel La Bahia—a sad place to make a last stand.

For a person who ends up so alone, he has some good relationships. Some of the spirited conversations with his ailing parents are among the funniest in the book. Not the typical mile-a-minute thriller, but one where you’ll want to savor the prose. And, you may find yourself pondering the possibilities, even after you turn the last page.

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Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

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No doubt many crime fiction readers eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow’s new legal thriller. I know I did, having been a fan ever since his debut with Presumed Innocent almost 40 years ago. I looked forward to seeing what his character, Rusty Sabich, is up to, now that he’s in his 70s. And, I relish the clash of wits in a good courtroom drama.

In the current book, Rusty’s tenure as a judge in fictional Kindle County, Minnesota, is finished, and he’s moved about a hundred miles north to rural/small town Skageon County. He’s living on a lake and has found a new live-in love, Bea Housley, a school principal.

Bea is not baggage-free. (Which of us is?) She has an irascible father and an adopted son, Aaron, in his early twenties who spent jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute (the drugs actually belonged to his on-and-off girlfriend, Mae Potter). Out on parole now, Aaron has to abide by certain rules: no driving, no associating with drug addicts, and no leaving the county. He’s in Bea and Rusty’s custody and living with them. Thankfully, he’s pulling his life together.

Mae, the beautiful young woman Aaron’s loved for years, remains a problem. He should not be associating with her, not only because it’s a violation of his parole, but because she’s unstable and manipulative. She’s like a tornado through the lives of her friends and family. But young love is what it is. She and Aaron are secretly considering marriage, and he proposes a weekend camping trip to sort out their future once and for all. No phones, no distractions.

The trip ends with a big argument between them, during which Aaron realizes Mae will never change, that she will always be totally self-absorbed, that people’s advice that she’s not good for him is correct, that he’s done. He hitchhikes home, just as Rusty and Bea were about to report his disappearance to his parole officer.

He makes it home. Mae does not. Two weeks later her decomposed body is found, apparently strangled. Aaron is devastated. Her family is too, and immediately points to Aaron as the probable culprit. That fact that he’s Black and Mae was white hovers over him. Is this why they never approved of Mae and Aaron’s relationship? Mae’s father is the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County and puts a lot of law enforcement pressure on Aaron. Eventually, Aaron comes to trial.

Much of the book is the unfolding courtroom drama. I liked that part a lot. It was fascinating to see how the defense team tries to unravel the prosecutor’s evidence, making what at first sounds devastating at least open to interpretation. If you enjoy courtroom scenes, you’ll find some riveting ones here.

But at 530 pages, the book has lots of other stuff packed in as well. There’s too much backstory about Rusty, Bea, and their families and, for my taste, way too much navel-gazing by Rusty around various issues. I recognized that he loves Bea and didn’t need it rehashed multiple times. He agonizes at great length about whether he should become Aaron’s defense attorney, as Bea pleads with him to. He shouldn’t, for obvious reasons, and you read all of them, many times. But of course he’s going to do it, or else what’s in those 530 pages? To complicate Rusty’s emotional state further, he and Bea have a serious falling out over an issue I found frankly implausible.

To sum up, while the trial scenes were great, much of the rest of the story was, for me, seriously over-written. It’s like eating three Christmas dinners in one evening. You’re so stuffed it’s hard to say you actually enjoyed the experience.

Jewels of Scandal and Desire

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For a long time, I’ve had the glimmer of an idea for a story about a jeweler for British royalty. You’ll remember how Elizabeth II always wore a lovely pin on her jacket when she was out in public. Somebody must have made them, cleaned them, repaired them. And somebody must have thought about ways to steal them. Somebody besides me, that is.

You can imagine how my interest was piqued by an American Ancestors program “Jewels of Scandal & Desire: British Jewelry Collections and Country Houses,” hosted by Curt DiCamillo, an authority on British historic houses and the decorative arts. He has actually seen some of that jewelry up close, in museum exhibits and when he was presented to the late Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, and The Prince of Wales.

No doubt this is a topic that could have a month’s worth of lectures, and in an hour he had to just hit the highlights and, in some cases, the lowlights of gems among the British royalty. Here are a few anecdotes.

DiCamillo began with Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing fortune. She had an unhappy life, but she did have fabulous jewelry, including the tutti-frutti necklace pictured above with 4500 emeralds, as well as rubies and sapphires, designed by Cartier and now in the Cartier Collection. Cartier also made the spectacular tiara owned by Lady Hugh Montagu Allan (above), who was aboard the Lusitania in 1915 when it was struck by a German torpedo and sunk. One of her maids saved the tiara and Lady Allan was badly injured, but her two daughters were among the 1,150 people lost.

The Earl and Countess of March were tied up for perhaps twelve hours in early 2016 when thieves invaded Goodwood House in West Sussex. They stole jewelry that was not only valuable in monetary terms, but the haul included an emerald and diamond ring King Charles II had given to one of his French mistresses, an ancestor of the Earl. A stolen tiara, containing hundreds of diamonds, was probably disassembled, Di Camillo said. Such pieces are almost never recovered, because loose diamonds are much harder to identify and easier to sell.

While diamonds are often the most prized of the four main gemstones, they’re actually the least valuable. Most valuable are emeralds, followed by rubies, sapphires, and then diamonds. DiCamillo says De Beers has millions of diamonds in warehouses that they don’t release; by limiting availability, they keep the prices high. In the 1700s, diamonds had been found only in India. In the 1800s, they were discovered in Brazil and, later, in South Africa and Russia, so are not as rare as one might think.

A hundred years ago, Margaret Whigham Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, was considered the best-dressed woman in the world. She lived quite a scandalous life and had numerous lovers. She even made it into a Cole Porter song. But in 1943 she fell 40 feet down an elevator shaft. Although she recovered, she permanently lost her sense of smell. She and the Duke of Argyll lived in beautiful Inverara Castle (where some Downton Abbey scenes were filmed). Alas, in 1954, her jewelry was stolen by cat burglars and never recovered. Eventually the Duke divorced her for infidelity (he was no peach, either). Once at the top of society, she died in a nursing home in 1992.

Lots of good stories could be spun from these little episodes, but they all seem to carry the same message: “wealth does not guarantee happiness.”