The Dain Curse

Stolen gems, cute ears
a cult with ghosts on demand
men dropping like flies.

Dashiell Hammett's second published Continental Op novel.

This was a novel in three parts, and a single story which was originally serialized in four parts in Black Flag magazine in 1928.

The Continental Detective Agency, San Francisco is employed by an insurance company representing a jewellery shop which loaned eight relatively modest diamonds to a scientist experimenting with changing the colour of glass - they hoped he would have succeeded with diamonds obviously increasing the value of the low value, discoloured diamonds. The diamonds were stolen in a robbery, and the jewellery shop was making an insurance claim. Later the agency is employed by two other clients all tied up in the same case!

From there a convoluted story that evolves and cycles through many, many characters is slowly worked though by the Continental Op, who remains unnamed as usual. Honestly the story is so convolved and complex with red herrings and false trails all the way through. Admittedly I read it slowly as the book resided in my car, so almost certainly not more than 30 minutes a day, and probably more days of not reading it than reading it. This didn't help. Wikipedia has a character list with fifty characters listed. A decent proportion of them were killed during the story!

For me it was 3.5 stars.