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In C.B. Wilson’s fiction, a diamond is never merely a diamond. It is a compressed biography, a little cathedral of pressure and light, an object that has survived geology, commerce, vanity, theft, inheritance. And a great mystery. Cheryl’s newest novel, “Water Diamond,” the second installment in the Gem Hunter series, is built on precisely that premise: every glittering thing has a past, and some pasts have teeth.
Cheryl opens the story in Phoenix, where the Wrigley Mansion, once called the Star of the Desert, sits high above the city. It is a monument to ambition and sunstruck romance. From there, we are transported to Catalina Island, where Wrigley’s Avalon becomes not merely a destination but a kind of Art Deco dreamscape. The Catalina “casino,” Cheryl reminds us, was not a den of roulette wheels and smoky desperation, but a dance palace. She paints a 1920s fantasy built for glamour, music, and release. In “Water Diamond,” such places do what the best settings in mysteries always do. They conspire.
At the center of the novel is Taylor Hunter, a gem recovery specialist whose profession has the wonderful pulp efficiency of something both impossible and inevitable. She retrieves rare jewels for insurance companies. She is aided by her twin sister, Hope, a diamond grader at the Gemological Institute, and by one of my favorite detectives, Glimmer, a miniature dachshund with the nose of a bloodhound and the wardrobe of a diva. Glimmer, who can sniff out diamonds from fifty feet below or above, is one of Cheryl’s most charming inventions. The canine detective is a reminder that the author’s imagination has always made room for animals not as accessories but as agents.
The plot turns on a stolen Art Deco bracelet, part of a duet that can be joined into a larger jewel. One half vanished in 1929 at the opening of the Catalina casino. To recover it, Taylor must do more than follow clues. She must excavate secrecy. The bracelet, Cheryl tells me, “has no past,” which is exactly the sort of declaration mystery writers live to contradict. A jewel without a history is not blank. It is hiding.
Cheryl’s authority comes from affection as much as expertise. A gemologist herself, she writes about diamonds not as props but as repositories of craft and time. She is fascinated by old mine cuts, by stones shaped by hand to glow in candlelight, by the way technology has altered brilliance without necessarily improving romance. The modern magnificent cut may explode under fluorescent light, but antique diamonds carry the slower shimmer of rooms we can no longer enter.
What gives “Water Diamond” its lift is C.B. Wilson’s appetite for connection. Wrigley, Catalina, Art Deco design, diamond history, family secrets, canine scent work, and the machinery of theft all become part of one bright mechanism. Cheeryl says she writes because she cannot stop herself, because research pulls her down rabbit holes she feels compelled to share. That impulse gives her mysteries their addicting energy. They are puzzles, yes, but also invitations. Follow the dog. Study the jewel. Look again at the setting. Therein lies the story. And the story is well worth reading.