Old and fairly good

I’d give this 3.5 stars if that were an option. If you care.

I think I read this about 30 years ago, when my mom picked it up. I read it again now out of curiosity — I remembered liking it SO MUCH and wondered if it would hold up.

It does and it doesn’t. It’s full of super cool details about the diamond industry. There’s a stone, not a diamond, but an unidentifiable stone, which appears to have healing powers. Naturally, if word got out about such a thing lots of people would have interest, right? Right! Some have good intentions, some not-so-good, but our protagonist has a family member who really really needs it. And then it gets stolen.

The plot isn’t complicated and as always I’m not going to go into it too much. The resulting caper-like action IS complicated, to the point where I just kinda went along with it without concerning myself too much with the details.

Here’s the thing. The girlfriend character, who admittedly gets much, much more to do than bat her eyelashes helplessly, is nonetheless a weird 1985 version of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I think that was both fresher and god help me, appealing to me back then. Now, I find quirky for quirky’s sake profoundly irritating.

That being said, Quirky Audrey is pretty cool, Springer, her gentleman partner who wants his damn stone back is pretty cool, and the book is kind of fun.