The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple
and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday,
her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very
night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic
Sergeant Cuff and the Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events
as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering
Sand. T. S. Eliot famously described THE MOONSTONE as 'the first, the
longest and the best of modern English detective novels', but, as Sandra
Kemp discusses in her introduction, it offers many other facets, which
reveal Collins's sensibilities as untypical of his era.