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It was the female warder, grim-faced as usual. It was always the same one. She was bringing Diamond’s breakfast. Now calling herself ‘Diamond Dupree’, she goes to Paris to become an artist’s model but the world there is brutal and cutthroat and she soon falls on hard times. When she manages to escape at the end of the First World War, she leaves behind a mystery – and a dead man. This felt like a huge family saga, a cross between Peaky Blinders, Eastenders and Downton Abbey! It’s tough and gritty, but very addictive and I stopped reading anything else so I could finish this. Diamond escapes to Paris and away from the violence and fear of living with Victor. But soon trouble finds her again…oh this book runs and runs. Leaving behind a dead body and forced to return to London, she meets Richard Beaumont, an aristocratic son, damaged by war but sparks fly between them. My first read by this author and it won’t be my last. This is historical crime drama at its strongest. A fabulous protagonist in the guise of Diamond Butcher, who reinvents herself as Diamond Dupree, and set in London and Paris in the early twentieth century, covering the period before and after WW1.
Diamond has three major romances in the novel. How did Keane balance the romance aspect of the story with the thriller?
About this book
But can we puhlease? *sighs* Coz, I. Was. Fascinated!! Stiletto knives… *shivers*. I know my friends won’t be surprised in the least *snorts*.
This book had me in a chokehold! Annie and Max (along with a certain someone!) consumed my thoughts and I couldn’t devour the book fast enough. Before you ask, yes *nods*, I can confirm that I held daily briefings with The Mommy detailing the current state of play in the book alongside theories on personal agendas and who’d copped it next! I was fit to burst with the need to talk to someone about this story. We follow Diamond Butcher and her family, once high up in the echelons of London gangland crime - now forced under the heel of her Uncle Victor who runs things. Diamond longs to escape and have her revenge on the Wolfe family who had such a feud with her family and killed her father. waves hand* No need to dwell on the fact it’s my first JK read. I will fix that egregious error as soon as I can finagle my TBR as I need more of this world. She has had enough of it in her lifetime-her father, the head of the Butcher gang, driven to France by his arch enemies, the Wolfe family, returning to London only to be murdered, leaving his wife and 3 children at the mercy of their enemies. But even worse, left at the mercy of their relatives…We then skip forward in time, Max and Annie have married…and divorced, separated from each other for more than a year they are still drawn to each other like moths to a flame. Old enmities persist, the Delaneys want Max to pay for times past. Smashed nightclubs, old mates dead, witnesses drowned. Who is on whose side? For fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers, as well as viewers of Peaky Blinders , this is historical crime fiction at its most compelling. The oldest and only girl in a family of London thieves, reinvented as Diamond Dupree, the latest Paris ‘it girl’ - the lover of an aristocrat, fearless and beautiful she is so compelling and a great female character. I really loved her, she was the personification of her name. Jessie wrote Dirty Game, her first novel, in just three months. She submitted it to six agents and within weeks, she had an agent and a three-book, six-figure deal. Jessie Keane, the writer, was born. It’s the early 20th century, and a desperate young girl changes her name and flees the confines of her brutal, dominating gangland family in London.
Along with those historical figures, Keane puts Diamond in the same room as Gertrude Stein and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. What tempted her to bring those historical icons into the narrative of the novel? Jessie lives in Hampshire with her partner who used to be her next-door neighbour before they fell in love. Diamond Butcher is a beautiful girl and the daughter of Warren Butcher the head of the Wolfe gang who run the streets of Soho. Her mother is Frenchie a woman that her father met whilst in Paris and they fell in love. Diamond also has two brothers Archie and Owen who is a bit simple after an accident at birth.
He had two brothers - both are now dead. His closest friend has been found hanging from a London bridge. As the police wrestle with a seemingly unsolvable case, Max is forced to revisit his painful past to find answers to a mystery that seems to make no sense at all. Who is targeting his family and why? But can she escape the long arm of the law and the hangman’s noose, when the crimes of her past finally catch up with her? Diamond Butcher sat in her cell and listened to the sounds going on all around her. Somewhere in the big stark echoing chill of Holloway Prison, a woman was wailing. Another was shouting and banging on the bars of her cell. Diamond made no sound. She watched a finger of daylight send a column of gold onto the cell wall and thought this can’t be happening. There’s a strong element of ‘beloved enemy’ in DIAMOND,” Keane says. “She has three romances, and we’re just waiting for her all the way through to finally find the right one and forget the rest. It helps to keep the tension going, right through to the end.” I really enjoyed this story, plunged into gangland London in the early twentieth century, this was a compelling story.
For fans of Martina Cole and Kimberley Chambers, as well as viewers of Peaky Blinders, this is historical crime fiction at its most compelling. Although this is set in the past, this book felt quite contemporary to me. It’s honest and believable. There is pain, love and hardship, life laid bare, it’s a real rip roaring piece of historical crime fiction.A sliver of panic was suddenly lodged in Diamond’s gut, making it clench. She looked at the dish of porridge as the warder withdrew. She knew she wouldn’t eat it. She couldn’t.
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