The Cursed Diamond
a Novel
by Anna Rasche
(Park Row Books/HarperCollins, November 2026)
Anna Rasche’s historical mystery, told in two timelines, is about fate, obsession, and the deadly price of ambition.
In New York City, a hundred years apart, the lives of two women–Jennie and Michelle–are bound by the dark legacy of a cursed Midnight Diamond. Both are obsessed by the mystesrious gem, said to bring ruin to anyone who owns it.
Author and gemologist Anna Rasche talks with Authorlink’s Doris Booth about what inspired her to write the intriguging story. Anna reveals the challenges of writing her second novel, and she details the true stories about the curses behind the Hope and Brunswick diamonds.
The Cursed Diamond opens in a prologue then moves to 2010 where we find Jennie working as a runner in the Diamond District. When a friend dies suddenly, he leaves her a cryptic note warning that she’s “Not Safe.” Her search for answers leads to an antique jewelry box, a clue to a hundred-year-old mystery, and the legend of the Midnight Diamond, a rare blue gem said to ruin anyone who owns it. As she gets drawn further into secrets and danger, Jennie realizes she isn’t just hunting a lost treasure. She’s uncovering a story someone meant to keep buried.
A hundred years befor (1910), heiress Marcella Porter sails home to New York on an ocean liner after a scandal disgraced her in London. She crosses paths with a charismatic nobleman and the Midnight Diamond, and she unknowingly smuggles the gem into the city. She is drawn powerfully to the stone. When her charmed life starts to fall apart, she has to decide whether the diamond will save her or destroy her.
Rasche says she was researching a forgotten Gilded Age jeweler when she found a 1901 newspaper article about the “Brunswick Blue Diamond,” a rare gem rumored to have been cut from the same stone as the cursed Hope Diamond.
About the author. Rasche is a historian and gemologist who has worked in the jewelry collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a curatorial fellow at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her debut, The Stone Witch of Florence, was a Globe & Mail bestseller, a Washington Post Noteworthy Book, a CrimeReads Best Debut Crime Novel, and an Indie Next Pick when Park Row published it in October 2024.
