Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell Union Square Press, HK$200
As rare as the most flawless diamond is the perfect heist, planned and plotted for every eventuality. The world's hugest haul, at the Antwerp Diamond Centre in Belgium in 2003, must rank near the top on that scale - if only for its audacity.
Except that the robbery wasn't quite executed flawlessly, despite years of painstaking research, as this account shows.
In Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History, Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell have carefully pieced together the gripping events that led to the theft of an estimated US$500 million in diamonds, cash and other valuables.
The robbers bypassed two police stations, armed patrols, video cameras and vehicle barriers - and that was even before they'd set foot inside the building. Astoundingly, the Antwerp Diamond Centre was supposed to be one of the most secure buildings in the world as it housed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of diamonds.
Interwoven with the lead-up to the robbery is the history of the diamond business. Cecil Rhodes, it turns out, came to dominate the trade by establishing a monopoly on water pumps.
Written in an easy style that bounds along briskly, Flawless draws the reader into the mystique and intrigue of the diamond world.
This is a book that not only sheds light on a momentous robbery, but shares some of the workings of the diamond industry.
For instance, on many days in Antwerp, dealers routinely carry around diamonds worth millions of dollars to show to clients, who can take them away for examination - this despite the fact that fake gems can be easily substituted for real, to be recut quickly in order to gain new certificates of authenticity so that they become all but untraceable.
It's an industry built on trust and honour and yet, as we learn, there are always those who knowingly or unwittingly allow clients to do what they want.
Enter a jewellery shop owner, Leonardo Notarbartolo from Turin, Italy, who with other minor criminals known as 'The School of Turin' decided to take on Antwerp. It took years of execution, casing the building and taking surreptitious photographs. This was a heist that required much patience and a fair sprinkling of luck.
Who, for example, could imagine that the centre's manager, Julie Boost, would surrender its blueprints to Notarbartolo, who claimed that he was thinking of upgrading his office and wanted to see the floor plans?
Another piece of luck for the robbers came in figuring out that styrofoam and hair spray would knock out the building's motion detector. 'It was genius in its simplicity, a hallmark of the School of Turin's operations,' Selby and Campbell write.
There was also the choice of the date of the heist. It coincided with two big events - one a tennis tournament featuring a diamond-encrusted golden tennis racquet in Antwerp. The other was the wedding in the city of Peter Meeus, director general of the Diamond High Council, both ensuring that attention was turned elsewhere.
The robbery passed off with barely a hitch, and the haul was unbelievable. One box contained 17 stones, all just under two carats - except for one that was closer to three carats.
So what went wrong? One was the careless dumping of paperwork by one of the heist members in a forest that was found by chance by former grocer August Van Camp, a member of a conservation organisation.
Another was that Notarbartolo returned to the scene of the crime to tie up loose ends. He was arrested, as were some of his accomplices.
They have done their time - but the spoils remain unaccounted for.
All of this leads to one single, irrevocable conclusion: who was it who said crime doesn't pay?