Deadly Jewels

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. (Mar.)