Fresh from her heady success at retrieving the Punjat’s ruby for the Prince of Wales, Miss Abigail Patience Danforth and her entourage are speeding toward San Francisco in a private railroad car when their journey is interrupted by train robbers. They murder her new friend, and steal her beloved horse, Crosspatches, along with Marshal Bill Tilghman’s foundation sire—an Arabian, priceless as a monarch’s pearl. Far from the familiar boulevards of London and New York where she had schooled herself in the infant science of detection, Miss Danforth disdains the famous lawman’s old-fashioned, slow methods of tracking fugitives across the vast wilderness that was then the Oklahoma Territory and creates her own – her only clue, the killer’s love of chocolate.

The friend of a foreign prince, Lord Grayson is gifted with a beautiful bedmate for his stay at the exotic palace. He is uncertain how to handle the situation, but he certainly wants to help her and not offend his royal hosts, because if he seems displeased with her then it would not go well for the lovely Lady Celia. Raised in a privileged life of a sprawling mansion, servants, and adulation, Celia Davenport can’t believe she’s been abducted, and is being forced into sexual servitude. Luckily, Robert St. Claire is her salvation in the form of a virile lover who takes her virginity, but also steals her heart, as he negotiates her release and takes her home.

From their creation in the maw of mollusks to lustrous objects of infatuation and conflict, a revealing look at pearls’ dark history. This book is a beautifully illustrated account of pearls through millennia, from fossils to contemporary jewelry. Pearls are the most human of gems, both miraculous and familiar. Uniquely organic in origin, they are as intimate as our bodies, created through the same process as we grow bones and teeth. They have long been described as an animal’s sacrifice, but until recently their retrieval often entailed the sacrifices of enslaved and indentured divers and laborers. While the shimmer of the pearl has enticed Roman noblewomen, Mughal princes, Hollywood royalty, mavericks, and renegades, encoded in its surface is a history of human endeavor, abuse, and aspiration—pain locked in the layers of a gleaming gem.