Young, ambitious Christine Smith is a jewellery expert working for a centuries old auction house, but in a world of aristocratic snobs, her working-class origins are holding her back. She's desperate to secure the sale of Vivienne Winter's gem collection: it's bound to be the biggest auction since Elizabeth Taylor's. However, meeting the Hollywood star is just the first hurdle Christine has to jump . . .
Vivienne's handsome, spoilt, sexy playboy grandson Angel is the heir to her fortune. The anger and resentment he feels towards his grandmother for selling what he counted on as his inheritance sets in motion a series of events with deadly consequences. Angel is totally unscrupulous, and no-one will come out unscathed. Family secrets cut sharper than diamonds ."
Rating: 3.5/5
I've come to know Rebecca Chance's novels as quite rude, but glamorous, over-the-top stories about people often living in a life of luxury and excess, and I love them! They're always outrageous, and that was most certainly the case with her latest book Killer Diamonds. The story sounded intriguing from the beginning - a world famous film star auctioning off her vast jewellery collection, and a grandson desperate to stop the sale to exact revenge so he can inherit his grandmother's millions. But with a jewellery expert on the case, and keen to make her mark in the auctioning world, Angel knows he's up against it if he is to get his grandmother Vivienne's jewels... what lengths will he go to to stop the sale?
First thing I have to note about this book is the fact that I really didn't like any of the characters at all. Not one of them. Angel was by far the worst character I think I have ever read in any book (which is saying something!), Vivienne was so self-centred, egocentric and awful, and Christine was just a wet fish, and needed to grow a bit of a backbone! There was only one character I remotely liked and he just wasn't in the book enough to redeem the character side for me! However, there was something fun about having characters I loved to hate - I really didn't care for what was going to happen to them, and I wished some bad things on some of them, I must be honest.
The progression of the story was very good, and as always Rebecca Chance writes incredibly well, writing this detailed world for her characters to live in, and you do become immersed in it to an extent. The world of Angel and Vivienne was very opulent, they had anything their hearts desired, and it certainly didn't make them nice people because of it. Angel in particular was a hideous human being, someone I wouldn't ever want to know myself, he was just vile and had no redeeming features at all. Some of the scenes about him were quite depraved, and I found them uncomfortable at times, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
The jewellery described in the book sounds absolutely beautiful, and I bet Chance had fun researching lots of glamorous pieces to base Vivienne's collection on, I could see why the jewellery expert Christine was so taken with them. Her job sounded really interesting, imagine being able to handle jewellery of that value, but I just couldn't warm to her as a person either, she was too weak to be surrounded by the people she was, she seemed a normal person caught in a toxic web, but I just couldn't feel much for her unfortunately. One other thing described really well in the book was the setting. Some of it takes part in London, other parts in Switzerland, and it was beautifully written, Switzerland sounds idyllic, and I can see why Vivienne was so taken with it.
Overall, this book was a fun read, but there were a few bits I just didn't enjoy, which isn't usually the case with Rebecca's books for me. I found some of the sex scenes were just too much for me, and Angel in particular is quite depraved in this sense, and these scenes just weren't for me at all. There is also some very very strong language within the book which I usually don't see in the books I read. Other than that, the story was interesting, and I was curious to see how it would all end for these people, in particular Angel and Vivienne. Full of money, excess, debauchery and more, this is certainly an eye-opener, and although for me it wasn't Rebecca's best book, it was still a good read.
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