At a Middle Eastern international airport, a Gandhian scholar from Hyderabad and a mining engineer from Johannesburg meet fortuitously and romance brews. Their love unfolds amongst stories of twelve celebrated diamonds that were once lost from India, changed destinies of emperors and empires since, and are the pride of nations around the world today. Their journey also confronts a wily diamond trader from Lucknow, a vivacious former clerk at Anglo-Dutch and an ambitious business woman of African political pedigree, once a student in Moscow. The Indian dies in a carjacking incident and a South African woman apparently jumps to her death from her sixth-floor hotel room. An eminent Brahmin scholar is crushed under the weight of “five thousand years of learning” when a giant bookcase topples on him. Are these deaths accidents or crimes part of a much larger web of desire, deceit, power & retribution in the five-thousand-year history of the world’s most magnificent precious stones? It is as much a literary novel as a fast-paced crime thriller with animated characters, who inhabit the richly evoked social worlds of global cities, from Johannesburg, Antwerp, New York to Hyderabad, Mumbai & Delhi. Within its fictional setting, for the very first time – the astounding trajectory of the world’s twelve premier diamonds is fully unravelled – that motivates its characters, intensifies its action, and solves the manifold mystery in the climactic finale. Sanjay Dharwadker is an alumnus of BITS Pilani in India. Currently based in Netherlands, he works closely with governments and the United Nations on identity law, policy and practices and continues to write. --- Dharwadker writes a fast-paced narrative with verve and wit. Dilip M. Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.