Publisher's Synopsis
The Emerson brooch with its two-million-pound ruby is put on public display only once a year at the annual soirée held by the lord and lady of a stately home on the Yorkshire Dales. The lord is killed and the brooch taken in a robbery, and the company that insured it hires private detective Harry Stark to track down the jewel and also to determine whether the robbery was real or staged. Stark finds that almost nothing he encounters in the investigation is what it seems to be and much of what is presented as fact is fiction. Newly arrived in Yorkshire, after a career as a homicide detective in Toronto, Stark persuades a former lover who runs a private enquiry agency to take him on as an agent. Unfamiliar with the ways of the North of England and in his first case as a private detective, he stumbles along on a trail as twisty as those that meander across the moors.
