Complete and unabridged, with 99 full-page plates by Johan Christian Dahl, J. M. W. Turner and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. A diamond taken from an Indian shrine is left to a girl on her eighteenth birthday and vanishes from her sitting-room that night, and eleven witnesses tell the story in turn. T. S. Eliot called it the first and best English detective novel. Collins wrote most of it under laudanum for gout, and afterwards did not recognize parts of what he had dictated. Ninety-nine plates of painting range from Abraham Storck's Dutch fleet to Gainsborough's portraits, matching the novel's movement between Indian diamond and English drawing-room.