Deadly Jewels

February 1, 2016
In de Beauvoir’s able sequel to 2015’s Asylum, Martine LeDuc, the publicity director for the city of Montreal, rarely finds PR pizzazz in academic dissertations, but she can’t resist researcher Patricia Mason’s claim to have proved the rumor that war-torn Britain stashed the crown jewels in Montreal. Martine accompanies the gawky grad student on an underground exploration, where they find macabre evidence that some of the jewels not only came but stayed: a skeleton with two jewels glittering against its ribcage. When Patricia is found murdered, Martine, aided by charming aristocratic police detective Julian Fletcher, resolves to find the girl’s killer, and in the process, she excavates the jewels’ provocative past of greed, war, and the occult. An overstuffed finale binds stories past and present in a slurry of coincidence, but even as the book reels toward the improbable, readers will enjoy the lurid, high-gloss history and the appealingly sardonic narration. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

January 15, 2016
The crown jewels, neo-Nazis, and Holocaust survivors play their parts in a Montreal mystery. It all begins when the publicity-obsessed mayor of Montreal calls his PR director, Martine LeDuc, into a meeting that could have far-reaching results for the city. Doctoral candidate Patricia Mason has made an amazing discovery in one of the hundreds of hidden rooms and tunnels that share the area under the streets with stores, restaurants, and subways. During World War II, Patricia explains, Great Britain sent gold reserves and bonds to safety in Canada. It also sent all the stones from the crown jewels, pried out of their settings and shipped in hat boxes, some of which may have been stolen. Patricia got some of her information from a college friend whose grandfather was sent to Buchenwald, where his expertise as a diamond cutter was used to re-create some of the crown jewels using less expensive stones. Now Patricia takes Martine to a room full of empty boxes, where they find an old corpse with a bullet in the skull and a few diamonds lying among the bones. Martine insists the police be called in the person of her friend Detective-Lieutenant Julian Fletcher, scion of a wealthy family well-enough connected to ignore the rules. Further investigation reveals a link to a neo-Nazi group that wants the jewels for the mystic power it thinks they provide. When Patricia is shot dead, Julian and Martine suspect a neo-Nazi leader who's as deeply involved in mysticism as Hitler himself. Martine is torn between her investigation and a crisis in her own life: her husband's ex-wife has asked him to take their children full-time while she works overseas. Martine must discover the truth quickly to prevent disaster from striking her blended family. Martine's second (Asylum, 2015) cleverly weaves real events into a mystery/thriller whose flashbacks contain the clues to solve the puzzle.

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March 1, 2016

As publicity director for the city of Montreal, Martine LeDuc is excited to hear that a graduate student at McGill University has discovered evidence the British crown jewels were sheltered in the Canadian metropolis during World War II. But when she and the student Patricia Mason participate in the excavation of the vault in which the jewels might have been stored, they find an old skeleton with a bullet hole in the skull and diamonds scattered around the floor. Then Patricia is killed, and both an elderly Jewish gem dealer and Martine's own family are threatened by neo-Nazis. VERDICT In Martine's second outing (after Asylum), de Beauvoir transforms a historical tidbit (the shipping of British gold reserves and securities to Canada for safekeeping during World War II) into a fascinating premise; an absorbing endnote details the historical record. An intriguing choice for readers of James Houston's The Blood Flag or Jon Land's The Last Prophecy.

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